Alicia Elsbeth Stallings (born July 2, 1968) is an American poet, translator, and essayist.
Stallings has published five books of original verse: Archaic Smile (1999), Hapax (2006), Olives (2012), Like (2018), and This Afterlife (2022). She has published verse translations of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things) and Hesiod's Works and Days, both with Penguin Classics, and a translation of The Battle of the Frogs and the Mice.
She has been awarded the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Stallings is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. On June 16, 2023, she was named the University of Oxford's 47th Professor of Poetry.
Background
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. She is the Poetry Program Director of the Athens Centre and teaches regularly at the Sewanee Summer Writers' Workshop and the West Chester University Poetry Conference. She is married to the journalist John Psaropoulos.
Writing
Works
Poetry
Stallings's poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Sewanee Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Dark Horse, The New Criterion, Poetry, and Poetry Review. She also contributes essays and reviews to the American Scholar, The Hudson Review, the London Review of Books, Parnassus, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Review, the TLS, the Wall Street Journal, and the Yale Review. Stallings work is widely anthologized, and has been included in the Best American Poetry in 1994, 2000, and 2015, and in the Best of the Best American Poetry (edited by Robert Pinsky). Stallings's poetry uses traditional form and has been associated with New Formalism.
Her first book-length collection of poetry, Archaic Smile, was published in 1999 by Northwestern University Press and in 2022 by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux; it won the 1999 Richard Wilbur Award. In 2006, she published her second book-length collection of poetry, Hapax, also with Northwestern; it was awarded the 2008 Poets' Prize, awarded annually to the best book of verse published by an American during the preceding year, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Benjamin H. Danks Award. Her third book-length collection, Olives, was published in 2012 with Northwestern; it was a finalist for that year's National Book Critics Circle Award. She published her fourth book-length collection, Like, in 2018, with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. It was a finalist for that year's Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. In 2022, Stallings published a selection of published poems, This Afterlife, also with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in the United States and Carcanet in the United Kingdom.
Translations & essays
Stallings is also a gifted translator, and has translated works written in Ancient Greek, Modern Greek, and Latin. In 2007, she published a translation of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura into rhyming fourteeners. The translation was introduced by distinguished classicist Richard Jenkyns and was published by Penguin; reviewing the book in the TLS, classicist and critic Peter Stothard called it "one of the most extraordinary classical translations of recent times."
In 2017, Stallings published a verse translation of Hesiod's Works and Days, including an introductory essay and endnotes, also with Penguin. Classicist, critic, and poet Peter MacDonald characterized it as a "superb creation" and praised Stallings's "mastery of a characteristic voice" for Hesiod, while also noting the virtues of her "persuasively argued and brilliant Introduction".
Stallings has also translated the Battle between the Frogs and the Mice, a parody of Homer widely regarded be a Hellenistic epyllion, into rhyming iambic pentameters; accompanied by illustrations from Grant Silverstein, it was published by Paul Dry in 2019. In her review of the translation, poet Ange Mlinko wrote: "It shouldn’t be so rare for a poet to be serious and to sparkle at the same time, but Stallings is one of the few."