She published Moss Lotus, a chapbook of poetry inspired by her experiences in China, as a sophomore English major at Goshen in 1983.

Her Ph.D. dissertation, Fixing tradition: The cultural work of Joseph W. Yoder and his relationship with the Amish community of Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, was supervised by Gordon M. Pradl.

Her first published poem appeared in 1977 in Images Remembered II, an anthology of the Poets-in-the-Schools Program of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

[1] She also wrote in workshops at Summer Happening '79 and under Deborah Burnham and H. L. Van Brunt at Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts in 1980.

As poetry's power often comes from linking two unlike things to release new insight, so my life has been charged by the experience of embodying a connection between disparate locations" (p. 8).

However, in Kasdorf's case she took the initiative to not only express personal issues of Mennonites but to publish them and become an award-winning poet for her courageous acts and writing.

[citation needed] Spicher Kasdorf won the 1991 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for her first book, Sleeping Preacher.

Poetry Spicher Kasdorf's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and numerous other journals and anthologies.