About

Julia Spicher Kasdorf has published five collections of poetry, most recently As Is, from the Pitt Poetry Series in 2023. 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), which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and Great Lakes College’s Association for New Writing.

A collection of her essays, The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life (Johns Hopkins, 2001), received the Book of the Year Award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature and was reprinted by Penn State Press in 2009. She has also published a biography, Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American, in the C. Henry Smith Series in Anabaptist Studies in 2003. With Joshua Brown, she published new editions of J. W. Yoder's 1940 Central Pennsylvania classic, Rosanna of the Amish; and Fred Lewis Pattee’s 1904 local color novel, The House of the Black Ring: A Romance of the Seven Mountains. With poet Michael Tyrell, she co-edited the anthology, Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (NYU, 2009).

Other collaborative projects include curating, with art historian Christopher Reed, two exhibitions of work by abstract painter Warren Rohrer and his wife, poet Jane Turner Rohrer, viewed in relation to their Mennonite background and to the nature of modernism. With Reed and curator Joyce Henri Robinson, she wrote for and edited Field Language: The Paintings and Poems of Warren and Jane Rohrer (Palmer Museum of Art, 2020). Kasdorf also edited a chapbook of Jane Rohrer’s uncollected poems, Acquiring Land (Cascadia, 2020). She works with Ann Hostetler and Philip Ruth on the editorial team of Painted Glass Press, devoted to publishing Mennonite and other literary writing. 

Honors include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, and support from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and PA Humanities. 

A Liberal Arts Professor of English, Kasdorf directs the Creative Writing Program at Penn State and teaches in the Summer Community of Writers of Chatham University’s MFA Program. She lives with her spouse, public historian Philip Ruth, in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania.