Julia Spicher Kasdorf
Award Winning Writer and Poet From Pennsylvania
Julia Kasdorf lived in New York City for almost ten years. While there, she changed her simple lifestyle and blended in with the popular city culture. She wore pants, short skirts, and cut her hair. While attending New York University she worked as an instructor and as a poet.She earned her Bachelors, Masters, and Ph.D while attending the University.
Pennsylvania Dutch Roots
Julia eventually left New York City and returned to Pennsylvania where she took a teaching position at a Messiah College, a Christian college that shares in the same beliefs that Julia was raised on. At Messiah College, Julia enhanced the campuses literary life by bringing a fresh and unique teaching perspective to the campus. She also took time off from teaching at Messiah and became a visiting professor at Pittsburgh University.
She published two poetry books prior to and while at Messiah College. The books, Eve’s Striptease and Sleeping Preacher are based on her Mennonite upbringing and her time while living in New York City. Sleeping Preacher won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.
Moves to Happy Valley
In 2000, she left Messiah College and took a teaching position at Pennsylvania State University in State College. At Penn State, she teaches creative writing, is the director of the Masters of Arts program, and continues to publish books of poetry and non-fiction.
Her other published works:
- The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life (2001)
- Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American (2003)
- Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn (2007) (co-edited with Michael Tyrell)
National Endowment for the Arts
The poet Eamon Grennan described Kasdorf’s work as "Crosshatched by body, spirit, and the relation between them; animated by bright instinctive exchanges between carnal and religious zones of experience; driven by an honest, explicitly female consciousness of what 'animal' and 'soul' might mean."
So, it is no surprise that in January 2009 she won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She intends to take a sabbatical in order to use the fellowship to work on her most current piece of writing, Poetry in America. She describes the piece as “a collection of poems that deal directly or indirectly with the presence of beauty, the eruption of instances of song or poetry and American places.”. Her poems in the book are set in Bellefonte, where she lives, and western Pennsylvania, where she grew up.
Source:
Collegian Online
PA Books Library at Penn State University.
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