Award-winning poet A.E. Stallings to give public reading at St. Olaf
Award-winning poet, translator, and critic A.E. Stallings will give a public reading November 2 as part of a two-day visit to St. Olaf College.
The event, which begins at 7 p.m. in Viking Theater, is free and open to the public.
Stallings has published three collections of poetry: Archaic Smile, which won the Richard Wilbur Award; Hapax; and Olives, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
She translated Lucretius’ philosophical epic, The Nature of Things, for Penguin Classics, and is currently completing a translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days for the same series.
Trained as a classicist and a resident of Athens, Greece, since 1999, Stallings often draws on the well of Greek and Roman mythology and art in her poems, weaving the threads of these ancient stories into contemporary contexts. She is known for her command of verse form, and her ability to bring freshness and idiom to traditional structures such as the sonnet or villanelle.
Stallings has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. The latter praised her “technical dexterity and graceful fusion of content and form,” noting that Stallings is revealing the timelessness of poetic expression and antiquity’s relevance for today.”
Her 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 (ed. Robert Pinsky). Her poems appear in The Atlantic Monthly, The Beloit Poetry Review, The Dark Horse, The New Yorker, Poetry, Poetry Magazine (Chicago), Poetry Review, and theTLS, among others. She also contributes essays and reviews to the American Scholar, Parnassus, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Review, the TLS, and the Yale Review.
During her time at St. Olaf, Stallings will speak to Classics and English classes, and meet informally with students and faculty interested in translation and poetry.
Her visit is funded by the English and Classics departments, the Great Conversation Program, and the Leraas Fund of St. Olaf College.