Julia Kasdorf

Julia Mae Spicher Kasdorf (born December 6, 1962) is an American poet.

Life
Julia Spicher Kasdorf is the author of three poetry collections--Sleeping Preacher (1992), Eve's Striptease (1998), and Poetry in America (2011)--all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Sleeping Preacher won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the Great Lakes College’s Association Award for New Writing, and Eve's Striptease was named one of the top 20 poetry books of 1998 by Library Journal. She also co-edited an anthology, Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn, with Michael Tyrell (New York University Press, 2007). Kasdorf was awarded a 2009 NEA fellowship for poetry and is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. She is also the author of a scholarly study of Pennsylvania writer Joseph W. Yoder, Fixing Tradition, and co-editor of two editions of Pennsylvania local color novels, Rosanna of the Amish by Joseph W. Yoder and The House of the Black Ring by Fred Lewis Pattee. Her essay collection, The Body and the Book: Writing a Mennonite Life, was awarded the Book of the Year award by the Conference on Christianity and Literature. She is Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies at The Pennsylvania State University.

In The Body and the Book, Spicher Kasdorf explores the cultural and geographical inspiration for her writing in the Mennonite and Amish communities of her origin as well as in the New York City where she studied creative writing and published her first book. In her essay, "A Place to Begin," she comments, "I liked being able to think in the free space between places . . . As poetry's power often comes from linking two unlike things to release new insight, so my life has been charged by the experience of embodying a connection between disparate locations" (p. 8).

Born in Lewistown, Pennsylvania, Julia Spicher grew up in the suburbs southeast of Pittsburgh near Irwin, Westmoreland County. Her parents were Mennonites born in Big Valley, Pennsylvania who chose to leave their rural community in central Pennsylvania for work in a city. Spicher attended Goshen College, in Goshen, Indiana, but completed her B.A. and PH.D. at New York University. As a student at Goshen College, Spicher visited China for the autumn of 1982 to do her Study-Service Trimester at Sichuan Teachers College and as a sophomore English major at Goshen in 1983 she published Moss Lotus, a chapbook of poetry inspired by her Chinese experiences. She earned her B.A., M.A. in creative writing, and Ph.D. from New York University (1997), where she studied with poet Yehuda Amichai, among others. Her Ph.D. dissertation, Fixing tradition: The cultural work of Joseph W. Yoder and his relationship with the Amish community of Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, was supervised by Gordon M. Pradl.

Spicher Kasdorf began to write poetry seriously during her high school years and credits the Poets in the Schools program for nurturing her interest in writing. Her first published poem appeared in 1977 in Images Remembered II, an anthology of the Poets in the Schools program. Two years later she wrote in workshops at Summer Happening '79 and under Deborah Burnham and H. L. Van Brunt at Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts in 1980. In 1981 she won the Scholastic Writing Awards with work that was then published in Literary Cavalcade. While a student at Goshen College she also had poems published in With, Builder, Christian Living, and the college magazines Record and Broadside.

Awards and recognition
Kasdorf won the 1991 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for her first book Sleeping Preacher. She has since won the Great Lakes Colleges Award for New Writing (1993), Book of the Year Award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature (2001), and the Pushcart Prize (poetry) (2004). She was awarded an NEA Grant for Poetry in 2009.

Kasdorf's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and numerous other journals and anthologies.

Poetry

 * Moss Lotus ([[chapbook; as "Julia Spicher"; illustrated by Suelyn Lee). Atlanta, GA: Pinchpenny Press, 1983.
 * Sleeping Preacher. Pittsburg, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992.
 * Eve's Striptease. Pittsburg, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998.
 * Poetry in America. Pittsburg, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011.

Edited

 * Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (with Michael Tyrell). NYU Press, 2007.
 * Joseph Yoder, * Rosanna of the Amish (Joshua R. Brown, co-editor). Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 2008.

Essays

 * The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life. rpt. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2009.