Kate Lebo’s first collection of essays, The Book of Difficult Fruit, is out now from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 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 Pie School: Lessons in Fruit, Flour & Butter (Sasquatch Books) and the poetry/ephemera/recipe collection A Commonplace Book of Pie (Chin Music Press). Her essays and poems have appeared most recently in Ecotone, Crazyhorse, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Inlander, High Desert Journal, and The Gettysburg Review, 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.