The Courage of Poetry: Alicia Stallings at TEDxThessaloniki

Through her poems Alicia Stallings talks about the courage of poetry. She talks about the courage of mastering and conquering fears through poetry, of diving in the uknown and embracing the fear of failure. Just as a bat has to drop into the uknown in order to fly, in the exact same way a poet deep dives into the unknown world of creation. Alicia takes us on a magical journey through her poems.

Alicia E. Stallings was born in 1968. She grew up in Decatur, GA, and was educated at the University of Georgia and Oxford University in Classics. Her poetry has appeared in The Best American Poetry (1994 & 2000) and has received numerous awards, including a Pushcart Prize (Pushcart Prize Anthology XXII), and the Benjamin H. Danks award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her first collection, Archaic Smile (University of Evansville Press) received the 1999 Richard Wilbur Award, and her second collection, Hapax, (Northwestern University Press) received the 2008 Poets' Prize. A third collection, Olives, is just out from Northwestern University Press. She has received fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, United States Artists, and the MacArthur Foundation (including the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant 2011). Her verse translation of Lucretius, The Nature of Things, is out from Penguin Classics. She has lived in Athens, Greece since 1999, with her husband, the journalist John Psaropoulos.

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