Lebo's The Book of Difficult Fruit, a collection of stories, essays and recipes centered around inedible, ugly and/or invasive fruit — such as the stinky durian, bitter quince and superfruit aronia — was selected as the winner of the Washington State Book Award's prize in creative nonfiction.
Notably, The Book of Difficult Fruit is also this year's title for Spokane Is Reading, the community-wide literacy event organized by Spokane Public Library, Spokane County Library District, and Auntie's Bookstore.
Lebo will engage with readers at two free community events on Oct. 26, with an afternoon session at SCLD's North Spokane Library and an evening session at Spokane Public Library's Central branch.
For more from Lebo, also make sure to pick up the latest edition of the Inlander.
For this week's cover feature, Lebo wrote a deeply reflective piece on the history and significance of local Indigenous peoples' annual camas root dig. Lebo spent time this spring with members of the Salish School of Spokane and two kindergarten-aged children as they traversed local fields to harvest camas root, once a staple source of nutrition in Native diets across the Pacific Northwest.
The Washington State Book Awards celebrate books published the prior year by Washington-based authors in a range of categories, from children's literature to nonfiction; biography to poetry. The awards have been given annually for 56 years, and are administered by the Washington Center for the Book and the Seattle Public Library.
Spokane poet Kathryn Smith was also among this year's finalists for the award, for her collection Self-Portrait With Cephalopod, and Pullman-based author Trevor Bond was a finalist for his nonfiction book Coming Home to Nez Perce Country: The Niimiipuu Campaign to Repatriate Their Exploited Heritage.
Other Spokane writers who've been honored in recent years include the following:
- Jess Walter: The Cold Millions (fiction, 2022)
- Stephanie Oakes: The Arsonist (young adult, 2018)
- Shawn Vestal: Daredevils (fiction, 2017)
- Sharma Shields: The Sasquatch Hunter's Almanac (fiction, 2016)
- Bruce Holbert: The Hour of Lead (fiction, 2015)
- Tod Marshall: Bugle (poetry, 2015)
