Arts and Letters Archives

Jim LaVilla-Havelin’s New Works Compel Us to Consider Sparse Land In a Hard Time

By James R. Dennis ● Arts and Letters ● December 10, 2025

Writer James R. Dennis reviews the work of a poet of the natural world as he gleans both beauty and lessons from the ‘weathered, scruffy landscape’ of Atascosa County, Texas.

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New Cli-Fi Novel Gropes for Happiness through the Dark of Texas Blackouts and Louisiana Heat

By Frances Madeson ● Reviews ● November 7, 2025

Delaney Nolan’s distinctively American novel Happy Bad asks: Are we constitutionally capable of surviving the disasters wrought by our corporate masters? An excerpt from the novel and Q&A with author Delaney Nolan explores.

PODCAST: ‘Curtains of Rain’ Revisits South Texas Histories of Environmental Racism as Queer Coming-of Age Story

By Marisol Cortez ● Arts and Letters ● October 24, 2025

Our podcast interview with author Anel Flores talks Monsanto’s decades of contamination in Mission, Texas, the beauty of South Texas people and places, and fiction as a practice of healing self by writing the pain of those who have wounded us.

‘Vanishing Ice, Melting ICE’—A Deceleration Quarterly Creative Review

By Deceleration Staff ● Arts and Letters ● August 29, 2025

Deceleration’s first quarterly creative review taps into deep wells of community talent responding to the vanishing ice of warming seas and recent ICE vanishings of our family, friends, and neighbors.

ASLE 2025: Can Poetry Save the World from Extractivist Plunder and Climate Violence?

By Carolina Hinojosa ● Arts and Letters ● August 15, 2025

These scholars of multi-lingual poetry from Latin America say yes—and that the Earth has a language that is archived by poetic thinking.

ASLE 2025: Femme Friendship as Eco-Resistance—From Barton Springs Attack to Poland’s ‘Sister Rivers’

By Kit O’Connell ● Arts and Letters ● August 14, 2025

Amid rising attacks on trans people, ideas from ‘queer ecology’ can light the way toward an alternative environmental politics capable of honoring ‘femme-coded’ ways of thriving beside and beyond our waterways.

ASLE 2025: As Attacks on Unhoused Increase, Kaia Sand Archives Alternatives to Criminalization of ‘Unwanted Persons’

By Michelle Yates & Marisol Cortez ● Arts and Letters ● August 13, 2025

In her plenary presentation at last month’s gathering of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, Kaia Sand detailed the many ways we construct homeless people as “unwanted persons,” but also the creativity embodied in alternative first responder systems that enact “care work without violence.”

ASLE 2025: ‘Collective Atmospheres’ and the Significance of Feeling the World

By Kamala Platt ● Arts and Letters ● August 13, 2025

From her many decades working to make space for thinking at the intersections of nature, culture, and justice, scholar-‘artivist’ Kamala Platt reflects on highlights from the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment’s biennial gathering last month.

ASLE 2025: Birds, Barrios, Borders, & Books—Chicanx Poetics and Publishing from the Belly of the Beast

By Marisol Cortez ● Arts and Letters ● August 6, 2025

Deceleration assembled a panel of South Texas writer-activists at the 16th convening of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment to explore what it means to write and publish for Earth protection and human rights in a time of authoritarian cruelty.

ARTS: ‘They Want to Kill Greta Thunberg’

By Shelley Ettinger ● Arts and Letters ● July 7, 2025

A poem by Shelley Ettinger.