The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford: A Conversation between James McWilliams and Kevin Prufer

Frank Stanford (1948-1978), a child of Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas, was published and known in his lifetime. Over the years, his poetry slipped out of the public eye, known mainly to fellow poets. James McWilliams’ recent publication, The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanford (University of Arkansas Press, 2025) brings new attention to the artist and his work. Seven years of research and over 200 interviews resulted in a book that has received stellar reviews. Cyrus Cassells, former Texas poet laureate, writes:

“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.”

James McWilliams and Kevin Prufer will discuss Stanford’s poetry, the American literary tradition, the south, and whatever else emerges in conversation. 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 Yorker, the Paris Review, the American Scholar, and Mississippi Review. He specializes in American history of the colonial and early national period, and in the environmental history of the United States.

Kevin Prufer is an award-winning author and professor in the creative writing program at the University of Houston. His first novel Sleepaway was published in 2024 and his tenth book of poetry The Fears received the 2024 Rilke Prize for American Poetry. Professor Prufer has edited several poetry anthologies and co-directs the Unsung Masters Series, a book series devoted to bringing the work of great but little-known authors to new generations of readers. He was recently appointed 2026 Texas State Poet Laureate.