About
Long Bio
Lex Orgera lives in North Carolina, writes poetry and essays, edits, gardens, studies herbs and plant folklore, wrangles a houseful of animals, and makes art. Lex’s poetry collection, A Partial List of Sorrows, is a 2026 National Poetry Series winner and will be published by Milkweed Editions in the fall of 2027. Her book about herbs for emotional support, A Melancholy Herbal, is forthcoming in spring 2027.
Lex’s third book of poems, Agatha (JackLeg Press 2025), was born out of a seventeenth-century painting of Saint Agatha by Francesco Furini and explores personal, cultural, and spiritual experiences of embodiment—from Agatha’s ordeal and the disorientation of concussion to societal ideals of gender & beauty and elegies for lost loved ones. Lex’s first two books are How Like Foreign Objects and Dust Jacket, both out of print.
Lex is also the author of a memoir in lyric essays, Head Case: My Father, Alzheimer’s & Other Brainstorms (Kore Press 2021), a book about the on-the-ground witness of her father’s early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease alongside stories about migraines, ghosts, visions, and the effects of grief.
Online poems can be found in places like Arts & Letters, DIAGRAM, Passages North, and Verse Daily. Poems in print are in journals such as Bennington Review, Carolina Quarterly, Conduit, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Hotel Amerika, The Journal, Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, Verse Daily, and West Branch.
Lex was the co-founder of the picture book press Penny Candy Books where she published picture books by many great poets like Shira Erlichman, Quraysh Ali Lansana, Tony Medina, and Bianca Stone. She currently edits poetry and nonfiction books, including an herbal imprint called Yard Dragon at Microcosm Publishing. Lex has been a recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, a fellowship at the Hermitage Artists Retreat, and has been nominated several times for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. She is on the board of Fonograf Editions and is a contributing editor at JackLeg Press.
Lex attended New College of Florida in the 90s (pre-fascist takeover) and got an MFA at Emerson College under the tutelage of Gail Mazur, Dan Tobin, John Skoyles, Peter Shippy, Bill Knott, and more.
Lex’s weekly newsletter is Crow + the Poet.
Short Bio
Lex Orgera is a 2026 National Poetry Series winner and the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Agatha (JackLeg Press) and a memoir, Head Case (Kore Press). Her book about herbs, A Melancholy Herbal, is forthcoming. Orgera’s poems have appeared in numerous magazines including Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Massachusetts Review, West Branch, and Verse Daily. Orgera has been a recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and a fellowship at the Hermitage Artists Retreat. She serves on the board of Fonograf Editions, is a contributing editor at JackLeg Press and lives, writes, and edits books in North Carolina.
