Kate Lebo’s classic cookbook Pie School: Lessons in Fruit, Flour & Butter was rereleased with new content by Sasquatch Books in August 2023. Her first collection of essays, The Book of Difficult Fruit (FSG) won the Washington State Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. Other recent work includes the chapbook Seven Prayers to Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Entre Rios Books) and the anthology Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze (Sasquatch Books), which she edited with Samuel Ligon. Her essay about listening through hearing loss, “The Loudproof Room,” originally published in New England Review, was anthologized in Best American Essays. She is also the author of the poetry/ephemera/recipe collection A Commonplace Book of Pie (Chin Music Press). Her essays and poems have appeared most recently in Orion Magazine, Cake Zine, Harper’s Magazine, Crazyhorse, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Inlander, among other places. A graduate of the University of Washington’s MFA program and Western Washington University, she’s also the recipient of grants from Spokane Arts and Artist Trust. Through the Arts Heritage Apprenticeship Program from the Washington Center for Cultural Traditions, she is an apprenticed cheesemaker to Lora Lea Misterly of Quillisascut Farm. She lives in Spokane, Washington.
Two new books that are much more than simply cookbooks (although they are very good cookbooks) take us on a journey through the meaning of pie in America -- and how to make one. It's easy as pie, after all. Featuring Stacey Mei Yan Fong and Kate Lebo, and moderated by OPB's Crystal Ligori.
