Jack Rickard

Jack Rickard is an artist, photographer, poet, and historian, currently on the artist roster of the "Arizona Commission for the Arts" as a facilitator of workshops throughout the state for writing life stories. Rickard his has been a guest speaker on the American West to Lions Clubs, Rotary Clubs, and other local groups in the Phoenix area. He taught American history, world history, and humanities for 25 years in Kansas and Arizona. He has a Ph.D. in adult education and history from Arizona State University.

A third generation westerner, the author brings together a myriad of experiences of growing up in the West. As a teenager he hitchhiked across portions of the West and followed the wheat harvest driving a truck and combine from Texas to Montana. He has been a lifeguard, truck driver, carpenter, construction worker, insurance salesman, YMCA youth director, boxer, scuba diver, college athlete, a U.S. Marine, a participant in the Sun Dance in North Dakota for the past twelve years, and Inductee to Athletic Hall of Fame, College of Emporia, Kansas.

The West is a familiar theme in his writing. His poetry was a regular feature of the Reno County Kansas New Times in the 1990s. His poetry has been featured in Western journals such as "Weber Studies," "West Wind Review," "American Indian Studies Center" at UCLA, "Owen Wister Review," "Westview," "Prairie Winds," and other journals recognizing his writing of the Great Plains and the Cheyenne and Lakota Native American tribes. In addition, his poems have been collected in two books, three chapbooks, eight anthologies, and have appeared in over one hundred literary journals.

He is a writer who has won a Pablo Neruda prize for his poetry, an artist who has produced special edition lithographs of his art, a photographer with many literary magazines in his credits, and an educator who won a distinguished teacher award from the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education. As a teacher he served as president of the Arizona Council for the Social Studies, the state organization for history and government teachers in Arizona.

Rickard has had numerous one-man art shows in Arizona and California. He designed the covers for his books, covers and interior artwork for his chapbooks, and has contributed photography and cover artwork for a number of literary journals.

By This Author

Change in the Weather

Late Night Lanterns