Join us for a discussion with author Celina Osuna, Assistant Professor of English at UTEP, who will read from and discuss her book, Desert Distortion: Revealing the Abundance of Contemporary Borderlands Ecologies. The event takes place on March 9th at 4pm in the Frank Waters Reading Room at Zimmerman Library with a reception and book-signing to follow.
Published in 2025 as part of the Desert Humanities Series out of Texas Tech University Press, Desert Distortion explores the fullness of desert places from multiple disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. Environmental humanities, critical theory, and literary criticism intersect with the Desert Southwest in this book that considers the multi-cultures, borders, and languages as well as nonhuman forces and elements like heat, distance, and light to dispel the dominant notion of desert as void. Working against static representations of the Desert Southwest, the book employs the term “desert distortion” to use the desert’s agency; unsettle old understandings; and allow for experiencing the dynamic desert anew. The title’s use of the word “revealing” embeds an argument that the desert is and has always been abundant. Desert distortion performs multiple, coexisting understandings of desert places and of place more broadly. Through expansiveness of vision and curiosity of exploration, the desert becomes a place of interconnection, proliferation, and imagination. The author, Celina Osuna, is a scholar and artist whose research on Indigenous and Latinx environmentalisms explores the aesthetics of desert places in literature, art, and film. She focuses on the impact of desert places on cultural imagination and geopolitical relationships to land and is also co-editor of Storied Deserts: Reimagining Global Arid Lands (Routledge, 2024). For this event, Osuna will read from and present on her book, and will also converse with graduate students from the English Department’s graduate seminar in American literature. Please join our dialogue on the topic of “desert distortion” and desert writing.
This event is tied to the English Department’s graduate seminar in American literature on the theme of Southwest Desert Writers and is co-sponsored by the Hector A. Torres Memorial Fund. Visit the Texas Tech UP webpage for more information on the book as well as the Desert Humanities Series.
