Hesiod, a contemporary of Homer, probably lived in the eighth century BC in the backwater of Askra, a hamlet in Boeotia, on the Greek mainland. As the probable author of both the Theogony and Works and Days, he is the first self-styled poet in Western literature, the first to tell us his own name and the first to advertise himself as a prize-winning poet. Alicia Stallings is an American poet and translator. She has published three books of original verse, Archaic Smile (1999), Hapax (2006) and Olives (2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her verse translation of Lucretius' The Nature of Things (2007) is published in Penguin Classics.