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 Más Tequila Review from 2010-2015. Vargas received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico, 2010. 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, 2009; Guernica, revisited, 2014, and a new collection of poems scheduled for publication in Summer 2022. He currently resides in Wisconsin, near the lake where Otis Redding's plane crashed.