About

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Kate Lebo is an essayist, cookbook writer, and poet. Her first collection of nonfiction, The Book of Difficult Fruit (FSG 2021), won the Washington State Book Award. Sasquatch Books released a revised and expanded edition of her cookbook Pie School in 2023. Other recent work includes the chapbook Seven Prayers to Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Entre Rios Books 2018) and the anthology Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze (Sasquatch Books 2017), 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 2013). Her essays and poems have appeared most recently in Orion Magazine, Cake Zine, Harper’s Magazine, 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.