Author Talk: James McWilliams – True Lit 2025
Schedule
Sun Oct 12 2025 at 02:00 pm to 03:00 pm
UTC-05:00Location
401 W Mountain St, Fayetteville, AR, United States, Arkansas 72701 | Fayetteville, AR
Author James McWilliams will discuss his book, "The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford.""The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford" offers for the first time a comprehensive study of Frank 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.
Books will be available for sale and signing following the event.
Learn more at https://www.faylib.org/event/13981465!
