James McWilliams - "The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford"

James McWilliams will discuss his new book The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford. A Q&A and book signing will follow the discussion. 

At the Co-op

RSVP HERE

About the Book: When twenty-nine-year-old Frank Stanford put three bullets in his chest on June 3, 1978, he ended a life that had been inextricably linked with poetry since childhood. Deeply influential but largely unknown outside his corner of the poetry world, this prodigy of the American South inspired a cult following that has kept his reputation and work flickering on the periphery of the American literary tradition ever since.

In his new book, The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford (July 2025 | University of Arkansas Press), writer and historian James McWilliams offers for the first time a comprehensive study of Stanford’s life and work. McWilliams's thoroughly and meticulously researched biography introduces Stanford to a broad readership—whose prolific output, rooted in the everyday experience, offers a touchstone to those who rarely read poetry.

Stanford’s poems range from one line to his 15,283-line epic, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. The vital thread running through all of his poetry is an ear for language that vies with Walt Whitman in its expansiveness and generosity. Stanford’s omnivorous attraction to vernacular, particularly Black and rural vernacular, centered on an admiration for the marginalized and eccentric. Blending the Southern Gothic of Faulkner and O’Connor with a racially egalitarian vision, his poetry thrives on the stories and traditions of the oppressed and forgotten.

The themes that preoccupied Stanford’s prolific output—language, sex, death, class, geography, commercialism, surrealism, film, race—also preoccupied the poet in his daily life, which was marked by heavy drinking, philandering, mental instability, emotional abuse, and, through it all, an inveterate desire for beauty. Constantly attentive to this tension, biographer James McWilliams traces the short and painfully complicated life of this hidden talent who left a lifetime’s worth of poetry that, through its grounding in the mundane, achieved a vision of the transcendent.

About the Author: James McWilliams is a writer and historian who teaches at Texas State University. His work has appeared in Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times Book Review, The American Scholar, and Mississippi Review.

In 2009, McWilliams was the recipient of the Hiett Prize in the Humanities, recognizing a person whose work in the humanities shows extraordinary promise for the future, and who is already making a difference in the way we think about the world. In 2007-08, he was a fellow in Yale's Agrarian Studies Program, and his work on agriculture appeared in The Atlantic and Harper's.