14 Facts About Frank Stanford

Frank Stanford was born Francis Gildart Smith on August 1,1948, to widow Dorothy Margaret Smith at the Emery Memorial Home in Richton, Mississippi.

Frank Stanford was adopted by a single divorcee named Dorothy Gilbert Alter, who was Firestone's first female manager.

The elder Frank Stanford died after the poet's freshman year at Mountain Home High School.

In 1964, as a junior, Frank Stanford entered Subiaco Academy near Paris, Arkansas, in the Ouachita Mountains.

Frank Stanford entered the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville where he started to write poetry, and soon became known throughout the Fayetteville literary community, and published poetry in the student literary magazine, Preview.

Five of Frank Stanford's poems appeared in The Mill Mountain Review later that year, and in 1971, The Singing Knives was published as a limited edition chapbook.

Frank Stanford spent much of 1972 traveling through the South and New England with Broughton, a communications teacher and filmmaker, and these interviews were published in The Writer's Mind: Interviews With American Authors, a three-volume set.

For several years, beginning as early as 1970, Frank Stanford meagerly supported himself by working as an unlicensed land surveyor.

Frank Stanford was buried in St Benedict's Cemetery at Subiaco beneath a stand of yellow pines, five miles from the Arkansas River.

Frank Stanford had spent time at the Arkansas State Hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1972 and may have had prior suicide attempts.

Wright, published a posthumous chapbook of yet more of Frank Stanford's poems, titled You, in 1979.

Furthermore, much of Frank Stanford's work is as yet unpublished, including the manuscripts: Flour The Dead Man Brings To The Wedding and The Last Panther In The Ozarks, and Automatic Co-Pilot.

Frank Stanford's work was published by Mill Mountain, Ironwood, and Lost Roads mostly as limited edition chapbooks.

Frank Stanford is one of the least known of the significant voices of latter 20th century American poetry, despite being widely published in many prominent magazines, including The American Poetry Review, Chicago Review, FIELD, The Iowa Review, Ironwood, kayak, The Massachusetts Review, The Mill Mountain Review, The Nation, New American Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry Now, Buenos Aires Poetry, and Prairie Schooner.