diff --git a/bindings/kepler.gl-jupyter/keplergl/keplergl.py b/bindings/kepler.gl-jupyter/keplergl/keplergl.py
index be2f8a26db..1cc347c43b 100644
--- a/bindings/kepler.gl-jupyter/keplergl/keplergl.py
+++ b/bindings/kepler.gl-jupyter/keplergl/keplergl.py
@@ -3,7 +3,6 @@
 from traitlets import Unicode, Dict, Int, validate, TraitError
 import pandas as pd
 import geopandas
-import shapely.wkt
 import json
 from ._version import EXTENSION_SPEC_VERSION
 import sys
@@ -34,14 +33,9 @@ def _gdf_to_dict(gdf):
     if gdf.crs and not gdf.crs == 4326:
         gdf = gdf.to_crs(4326)
 
-    # get name of the geometry column
-    # will cause error if data frame has no geometry column
-    name = gdf.geometry.name
 
     # convert geodataframe to dataframe
-    df = pd.DataFrame(gdf)
-    # convert geometry to wkt
-    df[name] = df.geometry.apply(lambda x: shapely.wkt.dumps(x))
+    df = pd.DataFrame(gdf.to_wkt())
 
     return _df_to_dict(df)
 
diff --git a/bindings/kepler.gl-jupyter/requirements.txt b/bindings/kepler.gl-jupyter/requirements.txt
index b78c442991..057a06ca3a 100644
--- a/bindings/kepler.gl-jupyter/requirements.txt
+++ b/bindings/kepler.gl-jupyter/requirements.txt
@@ -1,6 +1,5 @@
-geopandas==0.5.0
+geopandas==0.9.0
 ipywidgets==7.4.2
 pandas==0.24.2
-Shapely==1.6.4.post2
 traitlets==4.3.2
 traittypes==0.2.1