An ArtsBridge Scholar, she earned undergraduate degrees in English and Dance.
With the poet Bruce Snider, Lessley co-edited The Poem's Country: Place & Poetic Practice (Pleiades Press), an anthology of essays.
Lessley's writing has been published widely, appearing in newspapers and magazines such as The San Francisco Chronicle,[2] Poetry Daily[3], The Kenyon Review,[4] Missouri Review,[5] and 32 Poems,[6] as well as in numerous anthologies.
Her poems have earned awards including Southern Indiana Review's Patricia Aakhus Award for the best work across all genres in a given year, the Collins Prize from Birmingham Poetry Review, New England Poetry Club's 2015 Erika Mumford Prize, and a Discovery / The Nation Prize[7] from The Nation, among others.
Lessley is a contributing editor at West Branch, where she writes an annual column on contemporary poetry.