Rich Villar

Rich Villar is a poet, essayist, community health worker, and educator originally from Paterson, New Jersey. He is the author of the collection Comprehending Forever (Willow Books, 2014), and he has taught poetry, performance, and prose writing, in various community and educative settings, for nearly 20 years. His latest poems are anthologized in What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (Northwestern, 2019), and The Breakbeat Poets, Volume 4: LatiNEXT (Haymarket, 2020). He is a founding member of the Títere Poets, a collective of Latino poets interrogating systemic issues around manhood and masculinity; and he directs La Cocina, a community-based workshop and event series dedicated to Latinx writers in New York and New Jersey. He is an alum of VONA and CantoMundo and is a 2020 Fellow in Poetry with the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.