Julia Spicher Kasdorf

Julia Spicher Kasdorf has published five collections of poetry, most recently As Is, from 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 comprise Poetry in America (2011), Eve’s Striptease (1998), and Sleeping Preacher (1992) She is currently working with Rubin on a documentary 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.

Kasdorf thinks about the relationships people have with the communities and places they come from, and also those places they choose to inhabit, and her writing is often concerned with social and environmental justice. Past projects along these lines 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.