Poet Bios

hilbert.jpg

Ernest Hilbert

Ernest Hilbert is the author of Sixty Sonnets, All of You on the Good Earth, Caligulan—selected as winner of the 2017 Poets’ Prize—and Last One Out. He lives in Philadelphia where he works as a rare book dealer and book reviewer for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. His poem “Mars Ultor” was included in Best American Poetry 2018, and his poems appear in Yale Review, American Poetry Review, BOMB, Harvard Review, Parnassus, Sewanee Review, Hudson Review, Boston Review, The New Republic, American Scholar, and the London Review. Visit him at www.ernesthilbert.com.

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. For more information, see the Poetry Foundation’s website.