Julia Spicher Kasdorf

Julia Spicher Kasdorf has published five collections of poetry, most recently As Is, with the Pitt Poetry Series. In collaboration with photographer Steven Rubin, she published Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields, documenting human and environmental impacts of natural gas extraction in Pennsylvania (Penn State Press, 2018). Three previous collections in the Pitt Poetry Series include Poetry in America (2011), Eve’s Striptease (1998), and Sleeping Preacher (1992). She is currently working with Rubin on a documentary poetry and photography project about agricultural activity within 30 miles of her home in Bellefonte, PA.

Her awards include the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the Great Lakes College's Association Award for New Writing, a Pushcart Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry as well as the 2024 Outstanding Contribution Award from the Writers Conference of Northern Appalachia and the 2023 John H. Zeigler Historic Preservation Award for History and Heritage from the Centre County Historical Society.

Kasdorf thinks about the relationships people have with the communities and places they come from and the places they inhabit, as well as the ways global and local concerns influence those relationships. Her writing often focuses on social and environmental justice and identity. Past projects include a collection of essays, The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life and the biographical study, Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American. With Joshua R. Brown, she edited new editions of Yoder's regional classic, Rosanna of the Amish, and Fred Lewis Pattee's local color romance, The House of the Black Ring. With Michael Tyrell, she co-edited the anthology, Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn. In collaboration with Chris Reed, she created two art exhibitions and edited a book about two neglected twentieth-century Pennsylvania artists, Field Language: The Painting and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer. With Racine Amos, she co-directs a community-university collaboration to uncover and amplify the stories of historic Black communities in Centre County.