The Life & Poetry of Frank Stanford
Music Roadtrip
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Date: {'content': {'value': '2026-09-26T20:00:00', 'schema': 'datetime'}, 'data_type': 'single'}
Description: We are thrilled to welcome James McWilliams, author of the new biography of the late Arkansas poet, Frank Stanford, to the White Water on Friday, September 26th, for a special night in celebration of his book and of Stanford's monumental work. In addition to a Q&A between McWilliams and Matt White, there will be powerful readings from Stanford's childhood friend, Bill Willett, Zeitgeist Reading Series co-founder Jessica Maxwell, live music and more. The event begins at 8pm sharp and there is no cover charge, although the author will have copies of his book available to sign and purchase. 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 erudi-tion, accessible to those who rarely read poetry. 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 ten-sion, 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 mun-dane, achieved a vision of the transcendent. JAMES McWILLIAMS is a former winner of the Hiett Prize in the Humanities. He has written on a wide range of topics both academically and journalistically, with work appearing in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Oxford American, New York Times Book Review, Harper's, and elsewhere. He teaches history at Texas State University.
Website: https://www.facebook.com/events/804834082010637/
Address: White Water Tavern, 2500 W 7th St, Little Rock, AR, United States
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