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A new edition of Pie School is here!

Since the first publication of Pie School in 2014, Kate Lebo has inspired bakers everywhere with her witty and encouraging lessons on all things flaky and sweet. This completely revised edition includes 20 brand-new pies, including an invitation to take your pie-making to the next level with local landrace grains and “difficult” fruits. Beyond the bake, Lebo also invites us to ruminate on the social history and meaning of pie in the pantheon of favorite foods.

“Kate Lebo writes—and bakes pie—like absolutely no one else; her work and her words are to be treasured.”
—Elissa Altman, author of Motherland and Poor Man’s Feast

Read My Latest

O Lurida! in Orion

The Recipe Writer’s Dilemma in Cake Zine

Knowing Your Roots in The Inlander

Heart is Where the Home is in The Spokesman-Review

Take A Class

But How Do We Know? (Finding Your Authority in Nonfiction)

Via the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, July 14-20, 2024 (in person). In this class we’ll examine the different strategies writers use to create authority while not-knowing. We’ll explore how trusting ourselves and engaging with not-knowing can deepen intellectual honesty, personal vulnerability, and artistic surprise. We’ll read essays from writers like Jamaica Kincaid, Helen Garner, and David Foster Wallace and consider how they engage with certainty and doubt. Then we’ll practice moving forward in our work even (especially!) when we don’t know where we’re headed. You will write an essay, starting from what you don’t know and expanding the essay session by session. We will workshop essays as we go in their unfinished, unknowing stages, discussing the fundamentals of how we use research, personal history, and ideas to build something larger than what the essay is “about.” At the end of our week together, you will leave with a draft and a practice for how to open your own essays to many ways of knowing and not-knowing.

Writers on the Farm

At Quillisascut School of the Domestic Arts, August 14-18, 2024 (in person). Food is an essential part of the shared human experience, yet these connections fray when we do not acknowledge a food’s cultural ties or explore the bigger story about where our food comes from. How can we look beyond the merely delicious into something more complex, something that requires harder questions? What kind of food writing becomes possible when it is connected to ecosystems and farmers? In this multi-genre workshop for established and emerging food writers, students will deepen their explorations of food through personal narrative, firsthand experience, and research. We’ll discuss nonfiction, memoir, manifesto, fiction, poetry, folklore, and journalism, and we’ll write our own new work.

Pie School

I teach pie-making lessons in private homes and for culinary centers throughout the nation. For private lessons, go here.