A.E. Stallings

A.E. (Alicia) Stallings grew up in Decatur, Georgia. She studied classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford University. Her poetry collections include Like (2018), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Olives (2012), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; Hapax (2006); and Archaic Smile (1999), winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and finalist for both the Yale Younger Poets Series and the Walt Whitman Award. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry anthologies of 1994, 2000, 2015, 2016, and 2017, and she is a frequent contributor to Poetry and the Times Literary Supplement.

Stallings’s poetry is known for its ingenuity, wit, and dexterous use of classical allusion and forms to illuminate contemporary life. In interviews, Stallings has spoken about the influence of classical authors on her own work: “The ancients taught me how to sound modern,” she told Forbes magazine. “They showed me that technique was not the enemy of urgency, but the instrument.”

Stallings’s verse translation of The Nature of Things by Lucretius is composed in rhyming fourteeners, and was published by Penguin Classics in 2007. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. She is director of the Poetry Center in Athens, Greece, where she lives with her husband, John Psaropoulos, editor of the Athens News, and their son, Jason.