Book Talk: "Desert Distortion" with Celina Osuna

The desert is many things. How can we talk about its abundance? 

From literature, to film, to art, Celina Osuna’s book “Desert Distortion” explores the fullness of desert places with regard to cultures, borders and languages as well as nonhuman forces and elements like heat, distance and light. Dispelling the dominant notion of desert as void, it sets a stage to suit the polyvocality and abundance of desert places. 

Join Professor Osuna as she talks about what it took to make this book and its response to the desert using environmental humanities, critical theory, literary criticism and the practiced craft of writing and revision. Lunch will be provided. Click here to stream the event on ASU Live.

About the speaker

Celina Osuna is a scholar and an artist. She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso, and her research, with an emphasis on Indigenous and Latinx environmentalisms, explores aesthetics of desert places in literature, art, and film and their impacts on cultural imagination and geopolitical relationships to land. Her first monograph, Desert Distortion, was published in 2025 with Texas Tech University Press and she is co-editor of Storied Deserts: Reimagining Global Arid Lands (Routledge 2024). 

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