The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford

About

Kirkus Reviews – Best of 2025, Nonfiction

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.

The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford offers for the first time a comprehensive study of Stanford’s life and work, introducing to a broad readership poetry that remains both captivating to poets and, in its celebration of everyday experience over academic erudition, accessible 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.

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.

The ‘Mythical Existence’ of Frank Stanford: PW Talks with James McWilliams

Reviews

“Texas State University historian McWilliams has written an impeccably researched, capacious, and probing biography of the enigmatic, neglected Southern poet… McWilliams closes with a devastating portrait of the brilliant, promiscuous, financially burdened 29-year-old spiraling out of control and, despite a film and his own small press that he ran with poet/lover C.D. Wright, he ended it all in 1978 with three shots to his chest. The full-throated biography fans have been yearning for.”
—Kirkus Starred Review, April 2025

“McWilliams does a remarkable job connecting Stanford’s poetry with his personal life, particularly his lifelong friendship with Irv Broughton, owner of a small press and Stanford’s first publisher; his penchant for love triangles; and how his need for connection fueled his poetry. The end of Stanford’s life, which saw him cohabiting with two women in different towns and running an independent press before his death by suicide at age 29, is rendered here in spellbinding detail. It’s a page-turner.”
—Publishers Weekly Starred Review, July 2025

“McWilliams carefully frames why Stanford has been neglected by mainstream readership and rarely anthologized in comparison to his contemporaries….In all my days reading biographies and long-form essays about artists, their work, and their often fascinating lives, McWilliams’s important new book is near the top of the list of the very best of them. It belongs on your bookshelf, and its meticulous attention to every detail astonishes. I hope McWilliams’s long-necessary biography will persuade readers to experience Frank Stanford for the first time or convince those who have read him to return to him and listen.”
—Elijah Burrell, Southwest Review, August 2025

“McWilliams undertakes an immense task here by seeking to tell Stanford’s story—I would’ve thought it near impossible for someone to pull off at this high of a level, yet he does. The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford is a stunning consideration of the life and work of this American original, of the sacrifices and dangers of making art and of creativity, of the ways this world will try to break artists down, and of the conflicted, bright-burning heart of creation itself. It’s as essential as biographies get”
—William Boyle, Poetry Magazine, July 2025

“In his monumental new book about Stanford, straightforwardly titled The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford and published by the University of Arkansas Press on July 1, McWilliams leads with the horrible and well-documented circumstances of Stanford’s suicide. This structural choice — a correct one, I believe — confronts the aura and mythology of tortured genius early. Over the next 500 pages, McWilliams then proceeds to spool out in rich, fascinating and sometimes disturbing detail the course of Stanford’s brief but astonishingly productive poetic life.”
—Jay Jennings, Arkansas Times, July 2025

“This month, the University of Arkansas Press will publish The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford, the first full-length biography of the poet. Written by historian James McWilliams, a professor at Texas State University, the book represents the most comprehensive and nuanced portrait of Stanford to date. McWilliams spent seven years researching the poet’s life, conducting more than 200 interviews with friends, family, critics, and fellow poets. The result is a landmark biography that helps frame Stanford’s work—and mythos—in cultural and historical context.”
—Philip Martin, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, July 2025

“If you’ve never heard of the poet Frank Stanford, you’re not alone. Just who was Frank Stanford, what did he write, and why was his tragic, early death such a loss for the literary community at large? James McWilliams answers these questions in a compelling, readable biography that is full of exquisite, yet not tedious detail about the short and explosively creative life of Stanford.”
—Tracy Carr, Clarion-Ledger, July 2025

Praise

“This is a tour de force biography that toggles between moments in Stanford’s life in this world and moments in our time today, revealing why both Stanford’s work and spirit are still vital. Stanford’s relationship with Blacks during his time in levee camps is one of the most compelling and surprising sections of this book, but on every page of this picaresque biography there are so many moments like it that you will learn as much about the ills of this country as you will about the complexity of Stanford.”
—A. Van Jordan, author of When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again

“James McWilliams treats the lightning-flash, tempestuous life of Frank Stanford with verve, unremitting probity, and compassion. This astute, much-needed biography of a genuine American literary prodigy—a rambunctious southern visionary and iconoclast too often relegated to the back of the canon—is never anything less than essential and riveting.”
—Cyrus Cassells, 2021 Texas poet laureate and author of Everything in Life Is Resurrection: Selected Poems

“At the time of Frank Stanford’s untimely death in 1978, he seemed to be on the cusp of canonical status. Yet, almost fifty years later, except to a modest circle of devoted readers, his unique voice has remained relatively unknown. James McWilliams’s meticulously researched, candid biography, The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford, should go a long way towards remedying that. McWilliams’s close tracking of Stanford’s personal evolution alongside the evolution of his poetic vision charts the making of a radical southern poetic voice. Born at the dawn of the civil rights movement, Stanford gradually sheds, like an unwanted skin, the assumptions of his white privilege. Unfettered, in his magnus opus, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, written over a period of more than two decades, Stanford is able to hear multiple languages of the South—The stories they tell and the truths they reveal.”
—Mary Schmidt Campbell, author of An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden

Events

July 26: A Capella Books – Atlanta, Georgia, 3:30 PM

August 2: Buffalo, NY/ Fitz Books, 7:00 PM

August 20: Asheville, NC / Malaprop’s Books, 6:00 PM

September 3: Austin, Tx/ First Light Books, 6:30 PM

September 26: Little Rock, AR / White Water Tavern, Tim TBA

October 7: Chicago / Seminary Co-op & 57th St Books, 4:00 PM

October 9: Louisville / Surface Noise, 7:00 PM

October 12: Fayetteville Public Library, 2:00 – 3:00 p.m.

October 18-19: Nashville / Southern Festival of Books, Time TBA

November 1: Baton Rouge / Louisiana Book Festival, Time TBA

November 12: New York / Sarah Lawrence College, 2:00 PM

November 13: New York /192 Books, 7:00 PM

Media

“Wes Tirey interviews James McWilliams, author of The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford” – High Horse Magazine

“New biography explores myth, legacy of Arkansas poet Frank Stanford” – James McWilliams on KUAF’s Ozarks at Large

“The Thousand Souths of Frank Stanford” by James McWilliams at Salvation South

“The Reading Life: James E. McWilliams” at NPR’s The Reading Life with Susan Larson