Stanley Plumly was born in Barnesville, Ohio, in 1939 to a family who made their living moving between Ohio and Virginia doing carpentry jobs and farm work. Plumly's father was not only a hard worker, but also a hard drinker. Dying at fifty-six from a heart attack owing to his alcoholism, Plumly readily acknowledge's his father's presence in his poetry:
"I can hardly think of a poem I've written that at some point in its history did not implicate, or figure, my father" While at Wilmington College in Ohio, a small work-study school, Plumly received recognition for his writing abilities from playwright-poet-teacher
Joel Climenhaga. Plumly went on to receive his Masters and work towards his Ph.D. at Ohio University. In addition to publishing several volumes of poetry, he has taught at many major institutions, including
Louisiana State University, Ohio University, Princeton, Columbia, and the Universities of Iowa, Michigan, and Houston, as well as the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Plumly's book Out-of-the-Body Travel was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Plumly himself is recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship,
an Ingram-Merrill Foundation Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. Currently, he is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park.
• In the Outer Dark: Poems (1970)
• Giraffe (1973)
• Out-of-the-Body Travel (1978)
• Summer Celestial (1983)
• Boy on the Steps: Poems (1989)
• The Marriage in the Trees (1997)
• Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me: New and Selected
Poems, 1970-2000 (2000)
• Argument & Song: Sources & Silences in Poetry (2003)
