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Gisela Heffes is a Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at Johns Hopkins University as well as a writer, ecocritic, and public intellectual with a particular focus on literature, media, and the environment in Latin America. Her research interest focuses on topics such as city and rural spatialities, utopias, environmental narratives, displacement, and migration. She is the editor of Judíos/Argentinos/Escritores (1999), and two monographs: Las ciudades imaginarias en la literatura latinoamericana (2008) and Políticas de la destrucción / Poéticas de la preservación. Apuntes para una lectura (eco)crítica del medio ambiente en América latina (2013), which received the First Honorable Mention of the LASA Southern Cone section (Premio Libro Humanidades) in 2015. Dr. Heffes has edited the collections of essays Poéticas de los (dis)locamientos (2012), and Utopías urbanas. Geopolítica del deseo en América Latina (2013). She was the guest editor of “Ecocrítica,” a special issue of Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana (2014), and guest co-editor of “New Directions in Latin American Environmental Research and Practice,” a special issue of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (2022). Heffes has co-edited The Latin American Ecocultural Reader (2020), Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema (2021), Un gabinete para el futuro (2022), and Turbar la quietud (2023). She is the author of Visualizing Loss in Latin America: Biopolitics, Waste, and the Urban Environment (2023; recipient of an Honorable Mention by the LASA Environment Studies Section for 2023 publications). Her current research project is tentatively titled Material Dissonances: Toxic Matters in Latin America. As a fiction writer, she has published the novels Ischia (2000), Praga (2001), and Ischia, Praga & Bruselas (2005); the collection of short stories, Glossa urbana (2012); a collection of poetic chronicles, Aldea Lounge (2014); the bilingual novella, Sophie La Belle and the Miniature Cities (2016); the novel Cocodrilos en la noche (2020; 2023), and the bilingual collection of poems, El cero móvil de su boca / The Mobile Zero of Its Mouth (2020; translated to French, Portuguese, Swedish and German). The translation of her first novel, Ischia, was published in 2023 with Deep Vellum Press, followed by Crocodiles at Night, also with Deep Vellum (2025). Her latest books are Aquí no hubo ni una estrella (2023) and Si acaso dejara de importar (a poetry collection forthcoming in 2025). Heffes is the founder of the digital repository “Archiving the Future: The Recovery of a Heritage in the Making,” an initiative that seeks to gather and record the voices of Spanish-American writers living in the United States, in collaboration with Literal Publishing and the Humanities Research Center (Rice University). With George Handley, Heffes served as the co-president of ASLE (The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) from 2022 to 2024. She is now the Director of the Latin American Observatory (LAO), one of the eight observatories spearheaded by the Humanities for the Environment Initiative at the University of Arizona.
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