Julia Spicher Kasdorf
Julia Spicher Kasdorf is a poet and a Liberal Arts Professor of English at Penn State University where she specializes in teaching creative writing. She has published four books of poetry: Sleeping Preacher, Eve's Striptease, Poetry in America, and Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields, a collaborative documentary project with Steven Rubin. She is currently at work on a documentary project about farmers working within 30 miles of her home in Bellefonte, PA.
She 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.
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.
Woodmere's exhibition, Hearing the Brush: The Art and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer, was organized in conversation with Penn State professors Christopher Reed and Julia as a companion to the Palmer Museum of Art's exhibition, Field Language: The Painting and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer.