Events

 Alex Lemon is a thirty-year-old professor, critically acclaimed and award-winning poet, and recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He’s also an ex-college baseball star, ex-rampant partier, and a survivor of multiple strokes and seizures due to a vascular malformation in his brain stem and an extremely dangerous surgery designed to correct it. He tells his incredible story in HAPPY.    As a freshman in college, Lemon was the hard-partying dude everyone called “Happy.” Then he had his first stroke. For two years, he coped with his deteriorating health by drowning himself in alcohol and drugs, his charming and carefree exterior masking his self-destructive behavior as he endured two more brain bleeds and overwhelming sadness. After he miraculously survived the tremendously risky surgery, Lemon’s free-spirited mother nursed him back to health, once again teaching him to stand on his own.    HAPPY is an electric, hypnotic self portrait of a young man confronting mortality and the limits of his own body; it is also the deeply moving story of a mother’s redemptive and healing powers. Like Mary Karr, Mark Doty, and Nick Flynn, Lemon is a much lauded poet who can successfully shift between writing poetry and memoir; and his training as a poet lends his writing a rare precision and vividness. He is a brave and exhilarating writer whose Technicolor sentences make the world he describes pop and sing. In intimate, unflinching prose he writes about survival -- of the body and of the human spirit.    Alex Lemon was born in Iowa. He is the author of three collections of poetry, Mosquito and Hallelujah Blackout; and the forthcoming Fancy Beasts. His poems have been selected for the Best American Poetry series and have appeared in numerous magazines, including AGNI, BOMB, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Open City, Pleiades and Tin House. His awards include a 2005 Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2006 Minnesota Arts Board Grant. Lemon lives in Ft. Worth, and teaches English at Texas Christian University.    Check out the New York Times’ Stray Questions for Alex.