Agatha: October 13, 2025

“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. Essayist. Editor.

Important Stats

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: Human husband, three dogs, two cats

Books on nightstand: Falling Fine, Matt Hart; My Heart Is a Chainsaw, Stephen Graham Jones; The Collected Schizophrenias, Esmé Weijun Wang; Letters from a Stoic, Seneca

Most read book: Free Enterprise, Michelle Cliff

Number of cross-country drives: 7

Substack newsletter: Crow + the Poet

Kinds of books edited: Nonfiction and poetry; I used to run a picture book press.

  • 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. Pre-order.

  • Head Case: My Father, Alzheimer’s & Other Brain Storms (Kore Press 2021)

    Dust Jacket (Coconut Books 2013)

    How Like Foreign Objects (H-ngm-n Bks 2011)

  • The Smartest Mollusk, Arts & Letters

    Mountain Time, 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

    • National Poetry Series Finalist—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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