Julia Spicher Kasdorf to Read from her New Book Poetry in America

Accomplished writer, scholar and poet Julia Spicher Kasdorf will visit The Art Space in Huntingdon on Sunday, October 16 at 3 pm for a public reading of selections from her new work, Poetry in America.  The collection of poems was in part inspired by her experiences as a writer, mother, and traveler in Pennsylvania. Her reading in Huntingdon will relate to the region and follow up with a discussion of the challenges and importance of writing about particular places and people. Some of the poems read will be about the same area and people that Joseph Yoder described in his book, Rosanna of the Amish, subject of an earlier Kasdorf presentation. Although not necessary, the audience may prepare for the afternoon by watching the PNC show or reading ROSANNA.

Poet Julia Spicher Kasdorf once said in an interview that “nothing

is a bad topic for a strong writer” . . . apparently not even garlic, a 1978 Chevy or cardio-kickboxing, all topics featured in her new collection Poetry in America. Kasdorf, associate professor of English and Women’s Studies at Pennsylvania State University, was born in Central Pennsylvania and raised in a suburb of Pittsburgh. Poetry in America includes several nods to life in Pittsburgh and other locales in Pennsylvania.

Poet Eamon Grennan said, “I admire Julia Kasdorf’s poems for their alert eye, attentive mind, vigilant heart, all fused into a single, sometimes painfully aware, vision of the world. Bristling with narrative surfaces, angular emotional interiors, humorous sympathies, her poems move in careful zigzags. Plainspoken, both intimate and discreet, these poems take hold.”

Kasdorf is the author of two previous poetry collections: Eve’s Striptease and Sleeping Preacher, which won the 1991 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Award for New Writing in 1993. Kasdorf’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, and Poetry, as well as numerous anthologies, including the 2003 Pushcart collection. She is also the author of The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life 1991-1999, which won the Book of the Year Award from the Modern

Language Association’s Conference on Christianity and Literature, and Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American.

This presentation is free and open to the public. The Art Space is located at 212 4^th Street in downtown Huntingdon. Doors will open at 2:30 pm on Sunday, October 16 and the presentation will conclude with an informal reception.

Poetry in America is published by the University of Pittsburgh Press

88 pp. • 6 x 9 • ISBN 9780822961567 • Paper $15.95