The Midtown Scholar Bookstore is pleased to welcome award-winning author and poet Julia Spicher Kasdorf for the book launch of her new poetry collection, As Is. This in-person event will include a reading, audience Q&A, and book signing. To preorder a signed copy of the book, follow this link.
As Is gathers everyday poems written over time and mostly at 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 try to reckon with the demands of family, pandemic, aging and loss, even as they witness injustice, violence, environmental degradation, and climate crisis. Stories from intimate memories and public histories sustain a woman’s quest for meaning and peace.
About the Author:
As Is is Julia Spicher Kasdorf’s fifth book of poetry. Previous titles include Sleeping Preacher; Eve’s Striptease; Poetry in America; and Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields, a documentary project created in collaboration with photographer Steven Rubin. She has also published a collection of essays, The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life, and a biographical study, Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American.
Awards for her poetry include the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, the Great Lakes College’s Association Award for New Writing, a Pushcart Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. A Liberal Arts Professor of English at Penn State, she also teaches in the MFA program and Summer Community of Writers at Chatham University. She is currently working with Steven Rubin on a documentary project titled Homeplace, about agricultural activity near Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, where she lives.
