Stallings was raised in Decatur, Georgia, and studied classics at the University of Georgia (A.B., 1990) and University of Oxford. She is an editor with the Atlanta Review. Stallings lives in Athens, Greece, where she is the Poetry Program Director of the Athens Centre. She is married to John Psaropoulos, who is the editor of the Athens News.

In 2007 she published a verse translation of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things).

Stallings' poetry uses traditional forms, and she has been associated with the New Formalism, although her approach to formal verse is flexible, and she freely uses metrical substitution.

Her debut poetry collection, Archaic Smile, received the 1999 Richard Wilbur Award and was a finalist for both the Yale Younger Poets Series and the Walt Whitman Award. Her second collection, Hapax (2006), was awarded the 2008 Poets' Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry anthologies of 1994 and 2000. She has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, the Eunice Tietjens Prize, the 2004 Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, and the James Dickey Prize.In 2010, she was awarded the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize.