Stanley Plumly

Stanley Plumly was born in Barnesville, Ohio, in 1939. Plumly graduated from Wilmington College in 1962, and received his MA from Ohio University in 1968, where he also did course work toward a PhD.

Plumly’s books of poetry include Orphan Hours: Poems (W. W. Norton, 2013); Old Heart (W. W. Norton, 2007), a nominee for the National Book Award and a winner of both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize; The Marriage in the Trees (Ecco Press, 1997); Boy on the Step (HarperCollins, 1989); Summer Celestial (HarperCollins, 1983); Out-of-the-Body Travel (Ecco Press, 1977), which won the William Carlos Williams Award and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Giraffe (Louisiana State University Press, 1973); and In the Outer Dark (Louisiana State University Press, 1970), which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award.

Plumly also published the nonfiction books The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth, and Lamb (W. W. Norton, 2016), winner of the Truman Capote Award; Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography (W. W. Norton, 2008); and Argument & Song: Sources & Silences in Poetry (Other Press, 2003).

Plumly’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill Foundation Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

From 1970 to 1975, Plumly edited the Ohio Review, then The Iowa Review from 1976 to 1978. He taught at numerous institutions, including the University of Maryland, Louisiana State University, Ohio University, Princeton, Columbia, and the Universities of Iowa, Michigan, and Houston, as well as at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1978 and 1979.

Stanley Plumly died on April 11, 2019.