Now in paperback, and with a new preface, Julia Kasdorf's The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life investigates the often difficult relationships among writing, community, and belief. In the ten essays collected here—presented in relation to poetry as well as photographs and other illustrations—Kasdorf draws on family stories, historical documentation, and her own experiences to examine aspects of Mennonite life and explore a variety of themes, including gender, community, silence, place, identity, and the body. 
In each of the four sections of The Body and the Book, Kasdorf tries to reconcile her profession with the practical wisdom and habitual silence of her Mennonite heritage. In the first section, she delves into the old Amish settlement where her parents grew up and its lasting influence on her. The second section focuses on the obstacles she faces as a woman writing from a traditional and ethnic religious background. In each essay in the third section, she uses a historical episode as an occasion to explore the complex interconnections among voice, body, gender, and religious tradition. And in the last section, she demonstrates how writing enables an author to integrate disparate experiences and memories. Even as she strives to create herself as an individual, she cannot fully separate from the Mennonite heritage that has shaped her.

The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life: Essays and Poems (Keystone Books)

Biographies & Memoirs

Kasdorf, Julia Spicher

Arts & Literature

Penn State University Press

In Shale Play, acclaimed poet Julia Spicher Kasdorf and award-winning documentary photographer Steven Rubin explore the small towns, farms, and forests of Appalachian Pennsylvania to gather the stories of these places and the working people who inhabit them.
In the parlance of the oil and gas industry, “shale play” refers to a region exploited for its natural gas by means of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling—transient industrial processes that often occur far from the populations that benefit from them. Amid polarized claims about fracking and pressure to develop these areas around the world, this project gathers evidence from everyday life in the Marcellus Shale Play. Kasdorf and Rubin follow in the footsteps of the documentarians of the 1930s, such as the artists and writers of the Works Progress Administration, taking a deliberate and thoughtful approach to gather the stories of workers on pipelines and well pads, landowners and leaseholders, waitresses, ministers, farmers, retired miners, teachers, and neighbors. The resulting collage of vivid oral and pictorial testimony reveals the natural beauty of rural places as well as the disturbance and spectacle fracking creates.
A passionate work of witness, Shale Play invites the reader to look beyond the easy caricatures of the white working class to create an urgent, authentic representation of a sacrifice zone that fuels America.

Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields (Keystone Books)

Arts & Photography

Rubin, Steven

Photography & Video

Winner of the 1991 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. The poems in this book deal with life in a Pennsylvania Mennonite community and the tensions and conflicts that exist for the speaker as she tries to be true to two worlds, the other being New York City.

Sleeping Preacher (Pitt Poetry Series)

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

University of Pittsburgh Press

"You have to admire a poet who can take an onion, the flu, houseguests, migraines, and a nurse's coat and turn them in to poetry. Of course, Kasdorf is using the concrete to get a deeper things: there's an amazement at life in these poems, and a hard-headed determination to make it work." --Library Journal "It may initially seem as though Kasdorf has meant to shock the home folks with her new book. Think of her overall themes: Mennonites and sex, a novel connection. Yet Eve's Striptease uses these two lenses to focus on the world. However, viewing the book only in terms of ethnicity and biology trivializes what is a significant work by a brilliant young poet. . . . It is a book about coming to terms with one's sexuality and how that affects one's place in the world." --Pittsburgh Quarterly "Most readers will be grateful for the gift outright of Kasdorf's achingly beautiful language of desire and of a "full store" of unavoidable passings from discovery to dark discovery and from expectations and surprises of childhood to retrospections and surprises of adulthood." --Mennonite Quarterly Review "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, the poems in Eve's Striptease keep pace with a considered life in its search for some consoling 'homeliness' in the world." --Eamon Grennan Julia Kasdorf grew up in Western Pennsylvania. Her previous collection, Sleeping Preacher, was the winner of the 1991 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and was awarded the 1993 Great Lakes Colleges Association Award for New Writing. Eve's Striptease was named one of Library Journal's Top 20 Best Poetry Books of 1998. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, and various anthologies and journals. She teaches at Messiah college and lives in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania.

Eve's Striptease (Pitt Poetry Series)

History & Criticism

Poetry in America offers extravagantly formed lyric and narrative poems that function like works of social realism for our times: hard times, wartime, divorce, times of downturn and dissipated resources. Where, in such times, can poetry emerge, the book asks—and answers—again and again. Largely set in rural places and small towns, these poems are politically committed but deeply sensuous, emotionally complex and compassionate. They take up the everyday in meaningful ways, and deliver it with blunt force, yet not without hope or bright humor.

Poetry in America (Pitt Poetry Series)

As Is gathers everyday poems written over time and mostly at the poet’s home in the Ridge and Valley province of northern Appalachia. This work pays attention to the world as it is with curiosity, candor, and delight. Seeking connection with others and the earth and savoring the fine details of a messy life, these poems reckon with the demands of family, pandemic, aging, and loss even as they witness injustice, violence, environmental degradation, and climate crisis.

As Is: Poems (Pitt Poetry Series)

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