memoir

Coming Spring 2023: A Memoir of Frank Stanford in High School

We’re excited to reveal the first title in our 2023 catalog: “Subiaco’s Unofficial Poet Laureate”: A Memoir of Frank Stanford in High School, by Leo A. Lensing.

Coming Spring 2023

Leo Lensing’s vivid and critical account of the poet Frank Stanford in high school.

Lensing was a classmate of the poet Frank Stanford at Subiaco Academy, a college preparatory school for boys run by Benedictine monks at Subiaco Abbey that towers over the hamlet of Subiaco, Arkansas, near Paris, Arkansas on State Highway 22 between Little Rock and Fort Smith. Stanford transferred to Subiaco from the public high school in Mountain Home, Arkansas, in 1964; he and Lensing graduated on May 27, 1966.

Vivid, critical, and erudite, this memoir draws on archival research, interviews with monks, classmates, and other contemporaries, the growing body of Stanford scholarship, and Lensing’s original close readings of Stanford’s poems. The book illuminates previously unexplored corners of the poet’s adolescence and early development as a writer and a thinker, especially in the context of the Civil Rights Movement and desegregation.

Subiaco’s Unofficial Poet Laureate will be available for pre-order in late winter 2023 and copies will go out in the mail in the spring.

To request a digital review proof, titles for resale or institutional collections, or other information, contact us: publisher[at]foundlingspress.com.

About the Author: Leo A. Lensing

Leo A. Lensing is professor of Film Studies emeritus at Wesleyan University and lives in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. He is a frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and writes occasionally for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. His publications include The Anarchy of the Imagination (1992), a selection of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s essays and interviews, and Arthur Schnitzler’s Träume (2012), a German edition of the Viennese writer’s dream journal.