About
Beth M. Howard ….. Author, Filmmaker, Pie Baker
BETH M. HOWARD is the author of four books, including Making Piece, the cookbook Ms. American Pie, World Piece, and Hausfrau Honeymoon. She is the director, producer, and editor of the award-winning documentary feature, PIEOWA: A Piece of America. She has written for The New York Times, Real Simple, and Country Living, among many other publications. She has given a TEDx Talk on the healing powers of pie, and is a regular commentator for her local NPR affiliate, Tri States Public Radio in Macomb, Illinois. From 2010 to 2014, she lived in the iconic American Gothic House in Eldon, Iowa, where she ran the Pitchfork Pie Stand. In 2015, she embarked on a round-the-world journey teaching pie classes in nine countries to promote world peace. As a widow who understands grief and the importance of building community, Howard responded to the Sandy Hook Shooting in 2012 by organizing 60 volunteers to bake 250 pies for the residents of Newtown, Connecticut. Her story has been featured on CBS This Morning, CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, BBC, NPR, the Hallmark Channel, the History Channel, in the Los Angeles Times, Forbes, Reader’s Digest, and more. She divides her time between an Iowa farm and Los Angeles, and continues to write, bake pie, share her film, and advocate for a better, kinder world. Her website is theworldneedsmorepie.com.
The Backstory
One spring day in 2001, Beth Howard walked into Malibu Kitchen & Gourmet Country Mart, after a local newspaper reported it was popular for its pie, and tried to order a slice. Told they were “too busy to make any” she suggested they hire her to make pie for them. Asked what her qualifications were, she replied, “I’m from Iowa.”
While people assume she acquired her pie baking talents from her Midwestern grandmothers, it wasn’t until the age of 17, during a bicycle trip in Washington State, that she had her first pie lesson.
Caught stealing apples from the tree of a retired pastry chef, she found herself in this old man’s kitchen mixing dough by the light of a kerosene lantern and – voila! – her passion for pie was born. She spent one year at Malibu Kitchen baking pies for customers that included the who’s who of Hollywood like Barbra Streisand (lemon meringue), Dick Van Dyke (strawberry rhubarb), and Steven Spielberg (coconut cream). Her pie-making skills grew along with the volume of pies, once making over 200 pies in a day for Thanksgiving.
Beth has taught pie baking to all ages, all walks of life, literally around the world which she documents in her World Piece memoir. She has been blogging about pie since 2007 and gave a TEDx talk in 2013 bout the healing powers of pie.
Before becoming a “Pie Evangelist,” Beth was a veteran journalist. Her outdoor adventure and profile articles have appeared in Elle, Shape, Travel & Leisure, Sports Illustrated for Women, and other magazines, with assignments requiring her to sky dive, dog sled, scuba dive with sharks, and compete in the Eco-Challenge, a ten-day multi-sport wilderness race. During this period she moved to New York for a Senior Editor position with Sports Traveler, and simultaneously co-hosted “In-Line America,” an Outdoor Life Network TV series about skating, in which she appeared for two seasons.
In her earlier career as a PR executive she worked for a Hyatt mega-resort in Hawaii, where she assisted with “The Bob Hope Christmas Special,” and then for Rogers & Cowan in Los Angeles where she did the publicity launch for the original “Beverly Hills, 90210” TV series. But Beth considers her greatest PR achievement getting the New York Times to do a story on the small company she started in Nairobi, Kenya at the age of 25, importing zebra-striped tins she designed filled with roasted Kenya coffee.
In 1999, she was lured into the World Wide Web to produce websites for Internet innovator, Quokka Sports, where her projects included a mountaineering expedition to China and a round-the-world sailing race sponsored by British Telecom. It was after one too many 80-hour work weeks eating dinners out of Styrofoam containers at her desk and sleeping with a cell phone next to her pillow that she said, “Goodbye, cubicle (and big paycheck). Hello, pie!”
Happy but cash poor, Beth left Malibu Kitchen in 2002 for Seattle to do another stint as a Web producer, this time for MSNBC.com’s 2002 Winter Olympics official Web site, and then for MSN.com’s Women’s Channel. This led to ongoing freelance work with Microsoft Corp., as Content Editor for Bill Gates’ annual CEO Summit.
In 2003, she embarked on her greatest adventure ever: moving to Stuttgart, Germany to get married. Beth was married to Marcus Iken for six years, living in Germany, Oregon, and Mexico for his job with Daimler, until Marcus’ sudden and unexpected death from a ruptured aorta in August 2009. Delving further into her pie endeavors to ease her grief — including judging pies at the National Pie Championships and the Iowa State Fair and developing a pie-related television series.
Always mindful of pie’s healing powers, she traveled to Newtown, Connecticut after the tragic Sandy Hook shooting, organizing 60 volunteers to make 250 pies, which they delivered to ease the grief of the community. Her efforts in Newtown were documented on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360.
On the one-year anniversary of her husband’s death, she took a road trip back to her native Iowa to be a pie judge at the Iowa State Fair. After the fair she visited her birthplace of Ottumwa where she had her first pie. A few miles down the road she saw a sign for the American Gothic House (yes, the famous one in the Grant Wood painting) in Eldon, Iowa, and it was for rent! She moved in on a whim and lived there from September 2010 to September 2014 and in the summer months she sold pies to hungry tourists at her Pitchfork Pie Stand, taught pie-making classes, and wrote her first two books.
When she moved out, she embarked on a round-the-world journey to make pie in nine countries to promote world peace. It’s an “Eat, Pie, Love,” story as upon her return she returned to Southeast Iowa, where she now lives with her partner, a third-generation farmer, on his farm.
