A. E. Stallings

A. E. Stallings
Born	1968 (age 55–56) Decatur, Georgia
Occupation	Poet
Nationality	American
Literary movement	New Formalism

Alicia Elsbeth Stallings (born 1968) is an American poet and translator. She was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow.

Background

Stallings was raised in Decatur, Georgia and studied classics at the University of Georgia (A.B., 1990) and University of Oxford. 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 and is married to John Psaropoulos, who is the editor of the Athens News.

Stallings' poetry uses traditional forms, and she has been associated with the New Formalism, although her approach to formal verse is flexible, and she freely uses metrical substitution.

She is a frequent contributor of poems and essays to Poetry magazine. She has published three books of original verse, Archaic Smile (1999), Hapax (2006), and Olives (2012). In 2007 she published a verse translation of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things).

Critical Response

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."

Awards

Her debut poetry collection, Archaic Smile, received 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 and 2000. She has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, the Eunice Tietjens Prize, the 2004 Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, and the James Dickey Prize. 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.

Books

• Archaic Smile. (University of Evansville Press, 1999). ISBN 0-930982-52-5
• Hapax. (TriQuarterly, 2006). ISBN 0-8101-5171-5
• The Nature of Things. (Penguin, 2007). Verse translation of Lucretius, De Rerum Natura. ISBN 978-0-14-044796-5
• The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation. Eds. Greg Delanty and Michael Matto. (W. W. Norton & Company, 2010). ISBN 978-0-393-07901-2
• Olives. (TriQuarterly, 2012). ISBN 978-0-81015-226-7

External links

• (Archived 2009-10-23)
• Athens Centre 2009 Poetry Workshop webpage
• Poems by A.E. Stallings and biography at PoetryFoundation.org