Lexi grew up in South Alabama in a rural community with one flashing light and a small country store that sold everything from gas to pickled eggs. Her father, a circuit judge, collected clocks — chiming clocks that binged and banged all night long in rhythm with the trains that chugged and wailed down the railroad track not a hundred yards from Lexi’s girlhood home. Needless to say, Lexi is a very sound sleeper. And to this day, the lonely sound of a train whistle does something to her.

She grew up surrounded by cotton fields and wide open spaces. She was a major tomboy. Dressed in a boy cousin’s hand-me-downs, she ran barefoot, climbed trees, played in ditches, and picked sun-warmed dew berries off their prickly vines. Sometimes, her parents drove her into town to play with her city cousins. They played dress-up, made forts, charged up and down dirt mounds in noisy games of King of the Hill and chased the mosquito truck on their bikes.

Lexi’s mother was a high school English teacher who instilled in her daughter a love of reading and books. The muse first struck Lexi in the third grade, when she began to write poetry. Bad poetry.