November 13: James McWilliams- The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford
James McWilliams discusses his book The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford (U of Arkansas, 2025) with Patricio Ferrari
This event will take place in person at 192 Books at 192 10th Ave on November 13th, at 7:00 PM ET. Seating is limited and will be first come, first served.
Books will be available for sale after the conversation.
James McWilliams-The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford
University of Arkansas Press, 2025
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 lives in Austin, Texas and, when he can, New Orleans. He has taught at Texas State University since 1999 and has published articles in Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, the Paris Review, the American Scholar, Harper's, and the New York Times Book Review. He is a recipient of the Hiett Prize in the Humanities. He's now writing a book on the New Orleans poet Everette Maddox.
Photo Credit: Melanie Willet
Patricio Ferrari is a polyglot Argentine-Italian poet, literary translator, and editor whose transcontinental journey began as a Rotary exchange student at sixteen. He holds an MA in Comparative Literature from the Sorbonne, an MFA from Brown University, and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Lisbon. The author, editor, or translator of 20 books published across six countries—and with 4 more forthcoming in the US—he received the 2025 Fence Modern Poets Series Prize for Mud Songs, the first volume of Elsehere, a multilingual trilogy exploring how languages shape identity through what he terms "heterophony." His translations for New Directions include major works by Fernando Pessoa and Alejandra Pizarnik. Ferrari teaches in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College and curates World Poetry Salon in collaboration with the NYPL and Limelight Poetry, celebrating global voices across minor, major, and endangered languages.