Alicia Stallings, born in 1968 in Decatur, Georgia, is the daughter of a school librarian and therefore grew up around books. She attended the University of Georgia, where she began as an English and music Major. While reading in English, she says, she would "run into this Latin phrase and that classical allusion", which inspired her to take Latin courses and later to change her major. She attended Oxford for graduate school while she worked at The Instititue of Classical Studies in London as the canteen manager, where she met her husband. Stallings has been awarded the James Dickey award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Eunice Tietjens Prize from Poetry Magazine, and has been named a finalist for several other competitions, including the Yale Younger Poets Award and the Walt Whitman Award. Her collection of poems, Archaic Smile, has also won the Richard Wilbur award. She and her husband currently live in Athens, Greece, where Stallings continues to write poetry and works on a verse translation of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura for Penguin Press.