unicode error

error.txt

Sep 16 09:35:38 akara[8157]: [ERROR] Uncaught exception from 'geocode' ('http://purl.org/la/dp/geocode')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/tjohnson/src/dpla/ingestion/ENV/lib/python2.7/site-packages/akara/multiprocess_http.py", line 304, in _wsgi_application
    result = service.handler(environ, start_response_)
  File "/home/tjohnson/src/dpla/ingestion/ENV/lib/python2.7/site-packages/akara/services.py", line 417, in wrapper
    result = func(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/home/tjohnson/src/dpla/ingestion/ENV/lib/python2.7/site-packages/dplaingestion/akamod/geocode.py", line 63, in geocode
    place.enrich_geodata(DplaGeonamesGeocoder())
  File "/home/tjohnson/src/dpla/ingestion/ENV/lib/python2.7/site-packages/dplaingestion/akamod/geocode.py", line 526, in enrich_geodata
    coded_place = geocoder.enrich_place(self)
  File "/home/tjohnson/src/dpla/ingestion/ENV/lib/python2.7/site-packages/dplaingestion/akamod/geocode.py", line 309, in enrich_place
    new_place = self.geocode_place(place)
  File "/home/tjohnson/src/dpla/ingestion/ENV/lib/python2.7/site-packages/dplaingestion/akamod/geocode.py", line 332, in geocode_place
    geonames_json = self._name_search(place.name, params)
  File "/home/tjohnson/src/dpla/ingestion/ENV/lib/python2.7/site-packages/dplaingestion/akamod/geocode.py", line 437, in _name_search
    url = "http://api.geonames.org/searchJSON?%s" % urlencode(params)
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/urllib.py", line 1332, in urlencode
    v = quote_plus(str(v))
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xc9' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128