Occupation Poet Literary movement New Formalism Role Poet | Name A. Stallings Nationality American | |
Education University of Oxford, University of Georgia Awards MacArthur Fellowship, Poets' Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada Books Olives: Poems, Archaic Smile: Poems, Hapax | ||
Fairy Tale Logic by A E Stallings (poetry reading)
Alicia Elsbeth Stallings (born July 2, 1968) is an American poet and translator. She was named a 2011 MacArthur Fellow.
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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 and has lived there ever since. She is the Poetry Program Director of the Athens Centre. She 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.
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, 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 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.