Leslie Pietrzyk is the author of the novel Silver Girl, released in 2018 by Unnamed Press, and called “profound, mesmerizing, and disturbing” in a Publishers Weekly starred review. In November 2021, Unnamed Press published Admit This to No One, a collection of stories set in Washington, DC, which The Washington Post called “a tour de force from a gifted writer.” Pietrzyk’s collection of unconventionally linked short stories, This Angel on My Chest, won the 2015 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Kirkus Reviews named it one of the 16 best story collections of the year. Her previous novels are Pears on a Willow Tree and A Year and a Day. Short fiction and essays have appeared in Southern Review, Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, Hudson Review, The Sun, Shenandoah, Arts & Letters, River Styx, Iowa Review, Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly, New England Review, Salon, Washingtonian, Southern Indiana Review, Washington Post Magazine, and many others. She has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and in 2020, her story “Stay There” was awarded a Pushcart Prize. Pietrzyk is a member of the core fiction faculty at the Converse low-residency MFA program and often teaches in the MA Program in Writing at Johns Hopkins University. Raised in Iowa, she now lives in North Carolina. Website: www.lesliepietrzyk.com
Additional:
Other awards include residencies to The Hermitage Arts Center, Hawthornden Castle, the Wolff Cottage in Fairhope (AL), Writer in Residence at ARGS, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, and The Hambidge Center. Her short stories have been anthologized in many books, including New Stories from the Midwest, Baseball’s Best Stories, New Sudden Fiction: Short-Short Stories from America and Beyond, and Dictionary of Failed Relationships. Short story awards include the Jeanne Charpiot Goodheart Prize for Fiction from Shenandoah and the Chris O’Malley Fiction Prize from Madison Review. She is the founder of Redux, an online journal featuring previously published work.
Personal: Keep scrolling…
Click here for this website’s privacy policy.
Click photos to enlarge:
Credit: Photos by Susan Hale Thomas
Where I Teach:
Interview with Leslie Pietrzyk
Interview in The Rumpus (by writer Beth Kephart)
Maybe the biggest thing “about me” is that I love to cook, and I love to eat. I couldn’t imagine a website that didn’t involve food in some way, so throughout, I’m passing along some relevant and beloved recipes, starting here.
This is my recipe for Thanksgiving stuffing. I promise that you’ll love it! (I’ve even eaten it for dinner…as in only this, for dinner.)
Cornbread & Scallion Stuffing
Adapted from the beloved, still-missed Gourmet magazine, November 1992 (It’s actually called Cornbread, Sausage & Scallion Stuffing, but in an uncharacteristic nod to heart-health, I don’t put in the sausage. See the note below if you’d like to add the sausage.)
For the cornbread:
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- 1 1/3 cups yellow cornmeal
- 1 tablespoon double-acting baking powder
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup milk
- 1 large egg
- 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled
For the stuffing:
- ¾ stick unsalted butter plus an additional 2 tablespoons if baking the stuffing separately
- 2 cups finely chopped onion
- 1 ½ cups finely chopped celery
- 2 teaspoons crumbed dried sage
- 1 teaspoon dried marjoram, crumbled
- 1 teaspoon crumbled dried rosemary
- ½ cup thinly sliced scallions
- 1 ½ cups chicken broth if baking the stuffing separately
Make the cornbread: In a bowl stir together the flour, the cornmeal, the baking powder, and the salt. In a small bowl, whisk together the milk, the egg, and the butter, and add the milk mixture to the cornmeal mixture, and stir the batter until it is just combined. Pour the batter into a greased 8-inch-square baking pan (I actually use a cast iron skillet) and bake the cornbread in the middle of a preheated 425 F oven for 20-25 minutes, or until a tester comes out clean. (The corn bread may be made 2 days in advance and kept wrapped tightly in foil at room temperature.)
Into a jellyroll pan, crumble the corn bread coarse, bake it in the middle of a preheated 325 F oven, stirring occasionally, for 30 minutes, or until it is dry and golden, and let it cool.
Make the stuffing: In a large skillet, melt 6 tablespoons of butter and cook the onion and the celery over moderately low heat, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables are softened. Add the sage, marjoram, rosemary, and salt and pepper to taste and cook the mixture, stirring, for 3 minutes. Transfer the mixture to a large bowl, add the corn bread, the scallion, and salt and pepper to taste, and combine the stuffing gently but thoroughly. Let the stuffing cool completely before using it to stuff a 12-14 pound turkey.
The stuffing can be baked separately: Spoon the stuffing into a buttered 3- to 4-quart casserole, drizzle it with the broth, and dot the top with the additional 2 tablespoons of butter, cut into bits. Bake the stuffing, covered, in the middle of a preheated 325 F degree oven for 30 minutes and bake it, uncovered, for 30 minutes more.
Serves 8-10; fewer if I am one of the dinner guests!
Note: Here are the instructions if you want to add the sausage: The recipe calls for “3/4 lb bulk pork sausage” that you brown in a skillet. Remove it from the pan—leaving the fat—and proceed with cooking the onions, etc. Add the sausage at the end, when you combine the cornbread and scallion with the onion mixture.