Oct
11
11:00pm
Livestream: Richard Vargas & Carlos Cumpián
By Mystery to Me
About the book
This newest collection from Richard Vargas stands chest-to-chest with the realities of the American working class. At once acerbic and tender, the poems swell with curiosity and compassion for the people living in a culture designed to milk them dry. Vargas writes with humor, with wonder, with wickedness and guileless admiration, acknowledging those whose lives are seldom glamorized.
About Richard Vargas
Richard Vargas 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, and twelve issues of The Mas Tequila Review from 2010-2015. Vargas received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico, 2010, where he workshopped his poems with Joy Harjo. He was recipient of the 2011 Taos Summer Writers' Conference Hispanic Writer Award. He was on the faculties of the 2012 10th National Latino Writers Conference and the 2015 Taos Summer Writers' Conference. Published collections: McLife, 2005; American Jesus, 2007; Guernica, revisited, 2014; How A Civilization Begins, 2022, and a fifth book, leaving a tip at the Blue Moon Motel, published by Casa Urraca Press in 2023. 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 (paint, men's clothes, auto service/repair, and bookseller), warehouseman, infantry lieutenant, warehouse supervisor, UPS deliveryman, massage therapist, bookstore events coordinator, and inbound call center CSR (for several companies.) He is now retired and currently resides in Wisconsin, near the lake where Otis Redding's plane crashed.
About Carlos Cumpián
Carlos Cumpián is a Chicagoan originally from Texas. Human Cicada (Prickly Pear Publishing & Nopalli Press, 2022) is his fifth book of poetry; earlier works include Coyote Sun (March/Abrazo Press, 1990), Armadillo Charm (Tia Chucha, 1996), 14 Abriles (March/Abrazo Press, 2010), and the children's book Latino Rainbow: Poems About Latino Americans (Children's Press, 1994). Cumpián coedited Coyote's Song: Collected Poetry & Selected Art of Carlos Cortéz Koyokuikatl ( March/Abrazo Press, 2023).
In 2000, Cumpián was recognized with a Gwendolyn Brooks Significant Illinois Poet Award. He was also a finalist in the 2004 Illinois poet laureate search. His work has been reviewed in the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and the American Library Association Booklist Online, among other publications.
Cumpián's work has been included in more than 30 poetry anthologies, including Telling Stories: An Anthology for Writers (Norton, 1998.)
Cumpián's essays have appeared in Poetry magazine, including "Encounter Diana Solís" and in 2022, "A Chicago Original: Ana Castillo" for the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame Fuller Lifetime Achievement Awards book. In 2014, he published an essay on literacy, "Learned to Read at My Momma's Knee," for the anthology With a Book in Their Hands: Chicano/a Readers and Readerships Across the Centuries (University of New Mexico Press, 2014). Cumpián is also a playwright and wrote the satire Behind the Buckskin Curtain: Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.
Cumpián is the cofounder of March/Abrazo Press, the first Chicana, Native American, and Latino poetry small press in Illinois.
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Mystery to Me
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