A. E. Stallings

In a review for her book Archaic Smile, Able Muse, a formalist online poetry journal, noted that, “For all of Stallings’ formal virtuosity, few of her poems are strictly metrically regular. Indeed, one of the pleasant surprises of Archaic Smile is the number of superb poems in the gray zone between free and blank verse.” Her work has been favorably compared to the poetry of Richard Wilbur and Edna St. Vincent Millay. In a review of her second book, Hapax, Peter Campion critically wrote that, “The meter and rhyme unfold elegantly, but at the expense of idiom,” a criticism that is commonly aimed at the Formalist poets. On a positive note, Campion also states that, “[her best poems in the collection] match prosodic talent with intensely rendered feelings.” In a review for her collection Olives, Publishers Weekly stated that they were most impressed with those poems that were not responses to ancient mythology, noting, “When she unleashes her technical gifts upon poems in which she builds a new narrative instead of building upon an old one, Stallings achieves a restrained, stark poise that is threatening even by New Formalism standards.”

In 2010, she was awarded the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize. In 2011, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship, received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and was named a Fellow of United States Artists. In 2012, the book Olives was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. In 2019, her book Like was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

She is a frequent contributor of poems and essays to Poetry magazine and the Times Literary Supplement. Her work has been published in Beloit Poetry Journal. She published four books of original verse, Archaic Smile (1999), Hapax (2006), Olives (2012) and Like (2018). In 2007, she published a verse translation of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things) and in 2018, a verse translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days, both in Penguin Classics.

Her debut poetry collection, Archaic Smile, was awarded the 1999 Richard Wilbur Award and was a finalist for both the Yale Younger Poets Series and the Walt Whitman Award. Her second collection, Hapax (2006), was awarded the 2008 Poets’ Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry anthologies of 1994, 2000, 2015, 2016, and 2017. She has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, the Eunice Tietjens Prize, the 2004 Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, and the James Dickey Prize.

Stallings was born and raised in Decatur, Georgia and studied classics at the University of Georgia (A.B., 1990) and the University of Oxford (MSt in Latin Literature, 1991, Lady Margaret Hall). She is an editor with the Atlanta Review. In 1999, Stallings moved to Athens, Greece and has lived there ever since. She is the Poetry Program Director of the Athens Centre. She is married to John Psaropoulos, who was the editor of the Athens News.

Alicia Elsbeth Stallings (born July 2, 1968) is an American poet and translator. She was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow (the “Genius Grant”).