Julia Spicher Kasdorf

Julia Spicher Kasdorf

Julia Spicher Kasdorf was widely recognized as a poet before she became known as a “Mennonite poet.” She gained distinction with poems published in the New Yorker and the Paris Review. She won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Award for New Writing for her 1992 book Sleeping Preacher. Kasdorf received a Book of the Year Award from the Modern Language Association’s Conference on Christianity and Literature for her 2001 The Body and The Book: Writing From a Mennonite Life, 1991-1999. In addition to her poetry collections, she wrote the 2002 biography Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American.  She is the editor of Rosanna of the Amish: The Fully Restored Text, for which she wrote the introduction (Herald Press 2008), and co-editor of the 2007 anthology Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn.

Kasdorf was born to a Mennonite mother and father in 1962 in Lewistown, PA. Before she was old enough to form memories of living in Belleville, PA, her family's ancestral home, her parents moved away from the Mennonite community to Irwin , PA, abandoning the farming that her family had practiced in “The Valley” for generations. Kasdorf always felt that she did not belong at her new home, nor did she belong back in the Valley. She speculates that it was this sense of being suspended between traditional life on her summer vacations and the more modern world she took part in during the year that prompted her to start writing. She began to keep a compulsive journal during childhood, each night documenting what that day had held (Kasdorf Body 10-11).

Many of Kasdorf’s poems feature images that she remembers from summers on her grandparents' farm, and especially things that her step-grandmother, Bertha, taught her. Bertha appears frequently in stories in the essays of The Body and The Book. Kasdorf even dedicated her first book, Sleeping Preacher, to Bertha. Bertha worked hard during the summers Kasdorf spent on the farm to make sure that Kasdorf would remember where she came from. Kasdorf retained much of what Bertha taught her, and much of her work is an attempt to reconcile her past with her future (Kasdorf Body 12-19). Kasdorf currently lives outside of the larger Mennonite community as she did in childhood, but she still recognizes that being Mennonite is a big part of who she is. 

Kasdorf approaches subject matter that many Mennonites might consider taboo. As she has become more and more well known, she--along with her parents--have been forced to reconcile the need to write this poetry with the exposure it brings to her family and the community of her heritage. In a 2003 interview, Kasdorf said that her parents had to realize that she was helping people with her poetry in order to accept the exposure that came with it. In this way, they have become more comfortable talking about her poetry and with the idea of their daughter writing about nontraditional subject matter (Kasdorf interview).

Kasdorf attended Goshen College for two years before heading to New York University to complete her schooling and eventually receive a PhD in English Education (Hostetler 128). She is director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania ("Julia Kasdorf").