Please join First Light Books for a night celebrating THE LIFE AND POETRY OF FRANK STANFORD with author James McWilliams.

The event will begin with an author reception from 6–6:30 p.m., followed by a conversation about Stanford and the new biography. Tickets include a copy of the book and a reserved seat. Unreserved seats are available on a first come, first served basis. Free RSVPs are also encouraged.

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.

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.

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.

He'll be joined in conversation by poet Cecily Parks, author of three poetry collections, including The Seeds, which will be published by Alice James Books in October 2025. The recipient of the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, she is the guest editor of Best New Poets 2025 and editor of the anthology The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses. Her poems appear in The New Yorker, A Public Space,The Nation, The New Republic, several editions of The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. She teaches in the MFA Program at Texas State University and lives in Austin.