About

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 book about herbs for emotional support, A Melancholy Herbal, is forthcoming in 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, and West Branch.

Lex was the co-founder of the picture book press Penny Candy Books and is currently the associate poetry editor at JackLeg press and edits nonfiction books— including an herbal imprint called Yard Dragon—for 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. Her manuscripts have been finalists the National Poetry Series, Graywolf’s Nonfiction Prize, among others.

Lex’s weekly newsletter is Crow + the Poet.