Julia Spicher Kasdorf is a poet, essayist, and editor. She holds a B.A. from Goshen College as well as an M.A. in creative writing and a Ph.D. from New York University. Her lyrical poems, steeped in her family’s Mennonite background, explore faith, social justice, and cultural inheritance. Kasdorf’s poetry collections include Eve’s Striptease (1998); Sleeping Preacher (1992), which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award for New Writing; Poetry in America (2011); and Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields (2018). She is also the author of the essay collection The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life (2001) and the biography Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American (2002).
Kasdorf has received a Pushcart Prize as well as grants and fellowships from the Pennsylvania Arts Council, MacDowell, and the Fetzer Institute. Her poems have often been featured on Garrison Keillor’s National Public Radio program The Writer’s Almanac and have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Gettysburg Review, and the Antioch Review. She has taught at Pennsylvania State University, the University of Pittsburgh, and New York University.
