“I think these poems are what a soul assembling itself sounds like. They are ramps of energy, they are martyred and murdered efforts, they are alive and playful and full of verve and dead serious biting me with their French-tipped teeth.”
—Darcie Dennigan, author of Madame X
poet + writer
New book: Agatha
Favorite plant: Currently borage. Those florescent blue flowers!
Tarot card pulled most often: The Hermit
Favorite poem: Too hard. Merwin’s “One of the Butterflies” is one I think about a lot.
Current animal housemates: Husband, three dogs, two cats, intermittent outdoorsy cats, sneaky groundhogs.
Books on nightstand: Little God, Avni Vyas; The Wax Child, Olga Ravn; The Sonnets, Shakespeare; […], Fady Joudah
Most read book: Free Enterprise, Michelle Cliff
Number of cross-country drives: 7
Substack newsletter: Crow + the Poet
Factoid: I co-ran a picture book press for 5+ years
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This is not just a book about the body but a profound exploration of what it means to inhabit one. In Agatha, Lex Orgera masterfully weaves a tapestry of poems that delve into the myriad ways a body navigates the world-through selfhood, autonomy, and the inherent fragility of our human form.
Jackleg Press, 2025. Order.
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3 poems, DIAGRAM
Chaos Theory Against a Backdrop of Chaos,Verse Daily
3 Agatha poems, Memorious
2 poems, Vinyl
3 Schematics, Indianapolis Review
The Smartest Mollusk, Arts & Letters
Hurricane Season, Sixth Finch
First Life, Typo Magazine
2 poems, Interim Poetics
The Art of Making, Passages North
from The Book of Other, Diode
The Beginning of, Antiphony
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Biographical note
Lex Orgera is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Agatha (JackLeg Press, 2025), and a memoir-in-essays, Head Case: My Father, Alzheimer’s & Other Brainstorms (Kore Press 2021). Her work can be found in Bennington Review, Carolina Quarterly, Conduit, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Hotel Amerika, The Journal, Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, Nimrod, Passages North, Prairie Schooner, Verse Daily, West Branch, and elsewhere. Orgera is the Associate Editor at JackLeg Press and lives in North Carolina where she writes, edits, gardens & studies plants, wrangles a houseful of animals, and makes art.
Awards & such
National Poetry Series Finalist—2019
Verse Daily—2019
Hermitage Artists Residency—2014
Sarasota Arts Alliance Individual Arts Grant—2013/14
Winner of the Braddock Prize at Coconut Books—2014
Finalist in 5 national nonfiction book prizes, including Graywolf Press’s Nonfiction Prize
Finalist or semi-finalist in 16 poetry book prizes including Four Way’s Levis Prize, the Crab Orchard Series, Ahsahta Press's Sawtooth Prize, Alice James’s Beatrice Hawley Award, Tarpaulin Sky’s Book Awards, University of Wisconsin Press’s Brittingham and Pollack Prize, Conduit’s Minds of Fire prize, and Pleiades’s Robert C. Jones contest
3-time Pushcart Prize Nominee
Best New Poets Nominee
Recipient of two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes
Recipient of an Alumnae/i Teaching Fellowship at New College of Florida
Best Graduate Thesis, Emerson College
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