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.
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.
“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
“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
July 26, 2025 – A Capella Books – Atlanta, Georgia
July 27, 2025 – Third Man Records – Nashville, Tennessee
July 31, 2025 – TBD – Buffalo, NY
September 13, 2025 – Mississippi Book Festival
October 7, 2025 – Seminary Books – Chicago, Illinois
October 12, 2025 – Fayetteville Public Library – Fayetteville, AR
October 18, 2025 – Southern Festival of Books – Nashville, Tennessee
November 1, 2025 – Louisiana Book Festival– Baton Rouge, Louisiana
November 13, 2025 – 192 Books – New York
