Richard Garcia

2005 Banyan Review Poetry Competition Judge

Richard Garcia was born in San Francisco in 1941 and began writing in his teens. After publishing his chap book, Selected Poems, in 1972, he stopped writing for a number of years until an encouraging letter from Octavio Paz convinced him to return to writing. He published a bilingual book for children, My Aunt Otilia's Spirits, in 1978, and University of Pittsburgh Press published The Flying Garcias in 1991. He earned the MFA degree in creative writing from Warren Wilson College Writers' Program in 1994. His third volume of poetry, Rancho Notorious, was published by BOA Editions in 2001.

His poems have recently appeared in the web publications Perihelion, The Blue Moon Review, The Cortland Review, and in the print journals The Colorado Review, Notre Dame Review, Crab Orchard Review and Hayden’s Ferry Review.

Among his numerous awards are the Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the NEA. He was Poet-in-residence at The Long Beach Museum of Art for three years and at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles for 11 years.

He now resides in Charleston, where he teaches online for Antioch University and is on the core faculty of the Idyllwild Poetry Festival in California.

His next volume of poetry, The Persistence of Objects, is forthcoming from BOA in 2006.

You can obtain more information on his poetry and teaching from his website: www.richardgarcia.info.

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