Join Wisconsin-based poet Richard Vargas for a celebration of the publication of his latest poetry collection, The Screw City, which is to be released July 2025! There will be free refreshments. FREE to attend; Vargas will have books for sale at the end of the reading.
Vargas will be teaching a poetry workshop at Lake Literary Center in downtown Fond du Lac on Thursday, October 23, 2025, as well.
About The Screw City: “I am at an age when some poets get lazy and decide it’s time for the ‘New and Selected’ collection of their work. Those of us who are smiled upon by the big publishing houses (don’t look at me) most likely get gentle nudges to just do it and generate some quick book sales. It’s doesn’t take a lot of sweat and tears to put together about twenty-percent unpublished poems that are then padded with poems previously published in their books from years gone by. What they consider to be their ‘hits,’ along with a few misses. In my case, it’s merely an opportunity to present a sampling of my writing from the beginning to the present for those who have not read all my books. Has anyone read all of them? Buy that reader a beer.”
“Richard Vargas is a modern day lion of the literary underground, and one of the best working class poets to ever hold a college degree. The poems and stories in this book are a collection of life experiences and observations, a broken stained glass window, a kaleidoscope if you will, fragments of color, love and lust, hope and heartache, one hand reaching down to lift up the working dead, the other hand held high, middle finger raised proud in the face of a fast food nation that needs this work, these words of Richard Vargas, these prayers and pleas for respite and peace.” —Dan Denton, Author of $100-A-Week Motel and The Dead and the Desperate
“Richard Vargas clocks in with another winner. His latest collection of poems, cuts to the essence of human experience. He pulls back the veil on common, mundane activities which constitute the minutiae of life to reveal the motivations behind them that define our soul. These poems are the scars that build up from desperate living. As a proud citizen of Screw City, I’m so glad that work like this exists and you should be, too.”—Dennis Gulling, outlaw poet, author of Blood is Black in The Shadows"
About Richard Vargas: Richard Vargas was born in Compton, CA. He earned his B.A. at Cal State University, Long Beach, where he studied under Gerald Locklin and Richard Lee. He edited/published five issues of The Tequila Review, 1978-1980, publishing early works by Jimmy Santiago Baca, Alberto Rios, Nila Northsun, Dennis Cooper, Michael C Ford, Ron Koertge, and many more. His first book, McLife, was featured twice in February 2006, on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. A second book, American Jesus, was published in 2007. His third book, Guernica, revisited, was published April 2014, by Press 53, and was featured once more on Writer's Almanac. A fourth book, How A Civilization Begins, Mouthfeel Press, was released in September 2022. His most recent publication is leaving a tip at the Blue Moon Motel, Casa Urraca Press, July 2023. A new collection, The Screw City Poems, (poems about people and places in Rockford, IL during the times he lived and worked there: 1995-2002 and 2015-2018) published by Roadside Press, will be released in July 2025. Vargas received his MFA from the University of New Mexico, 2010, where he workshopped his poetry with Joy Harjo. He was recipient of the 2011 Taos Summer Writers’ Conference’s Hispanic Writer Award, was on the faculty of the 2012 10th National Latino Writers Conference and facilitated a workshop at the 2015 Taos Summer Writers’ Conference. He also edited/published The Más Tequila Review from 2009-2015, featuring poets from across the country. His poetry continues to appear in poetry journals and anthologies.
His work history is long and varied. Some of the jobs he’s had since the 1970s: fry and grill cook, women’s shoes salesman, bank employee, gas station attendant, retail sales/clerk (for house paint, men’s clothes, auto service/repair and bookseller), warehouseman, infantry lieutenant, warehouse supervisor, UPS deliveryman, massage therapist, bookstore events coordinator, inbound call center CSR (for several companies.) He is now retired but works part-time processing donated clothing at a local Goodwill. Richard currently resides in Wisconsin, near the lake where Otis Redding’s plane crashed.
The Lake Reading Series features published authors whose books have been released within the last year. Quarterly author readings, signings, book sales, and conversation at Lake Lit, every quarter on the fourth Thursday of the month, except for April. For 2025, the Lake Reading Series will present authors on January 23 (Larissa Antonioni), April 12 (James Hamilton and Luke Welch), July 24 (TBD), and October 23 (Richard Vargas).