11-06 | Meet the Author - Keith Pilapil Lesmeister

About this event

Ask Me About the Money is a collection of stories that tracks everyday moments, decisions, and complications with money. A father-and-son duo investigate a bad check. A husband and wife drive thirty miles to use a free beer coupon. One character, living in a motel, is offered unsavory work opportunities. With profound empathy, searing details, and propulsive scenes, these stories introduce situations at once simple and profound, strange and familiar—lives upturned because of a misstep, a miscalculation, or a blatant act. Money takes center stage, but these stories include a host of other themes: family and relationships, Midwestern woes, and racial identity. From railroad tracks, to cheap motels, from garage sales to cow pastures, Keith Pilapil Lesmeister tunes our hearts to the powerful frequency of money.

Keith Pilapil Lesmeister is the author of the story collections Ask Me About the Money and

We Could’ve Been Happy Here. A graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, his work has

received support from the Anderson Center, Iowa Arts Council, and Springboard for the Arts.

His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, december magazine, Gettysburg Review,

New Stories from the Midwest, North American Review, Redivider, Terrain, and elsewhere. He’s

a founding editor of Cutleaf and currently lives and works in Northeast Iowa.

This event will be moderated by Kali White VanBaale, a Des Moines-area creative writing professor and award-winning author of Release of Information, The Monsters We Make, The Good Divide, and The Space Between. She’s the recipient of an American Book Award, an Independent Publisher’s silver medal for general fiction, the Fred Bonnie Memorial First Novel Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award for General Fiction, an Iowa Arts Council major artist grant, and the Great River Writer’s Retreat. Kali holds an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She’s a core faculty member in the Lindenwood University MFA in Writing Program and regularly teaches writing workshops at various conferences and festivals. In addition to writing and teaching, Kali is an advocate and state lobbyist for mental healthcare reform.