ASLE is grateful to have so many engaged members who volunteer their time to help run our organization. Our most recent elections took place in November, and we are delighted to announce these new officers joining our leadership team:

• Gisela Heffes, Rice University, and George Handley, Brigham Young University, Co-Presidents
• Scott Hess, Earlham College, Executive Council Conference Chair Seat
• Jesse Oak Taylor, University of Washington, Executive Council Regional Collaboratories Seat
• Cassie Galentine, University of Oregon, Graduate Student Liaison (GSL)

Our new Co-Presidents have composed a message in both English and Spanish:

We are very honored, thrilled and delighted to serve as the new co-presidents of ASLE, one of the most vibrant, intellectually engaging, inclusive and diverse organizations of which we have ever been a part. We are thankful to the amazing members and the outstanding officers who have shaped ASLE’s history and helped it to become what it is today. Together with a great leadership team, we are looking forward to helping ASLE grow, both locally and internationally, and to make its resources accessible to everyone, in different languages, and in different parts of the globe. We are committed to helping ASLE continue to be an inspiring place that cherishes and welcomes scholars, artists, writers and people from all different communities and backgrounds.

Estamos honrados, entusiasmados y encantados de servir como los nuevos presidentes de ASLE, una de las organizaciones más vibrantes, inclusivas, diversas e intelectualmente comprometidas que conocemos. Nuestro agradecimiento a los maravillosos miembros e integrantes del comité ejecutivo, quienes forjaron la historia de ASLE y ayudaron a que ASLE sea lo que es hoy. Estamos deseosos de trabajar junto a un equipo excelente de profesionales y líderes para promover su crecimiento, a nivel local como internacional, y garantizar que sus recursos son accesibles para todos, en variadas lenguas, y en diferentes partes del mundo. En breve, asegurar que ASLE continúa siendo un lugar de inspiración que acoge y da la bienvenida tanto a investigadores como artistas, escritores, y personas provenientes de diversas comunidades y orígenes.

Gisela Heffes is a writer and professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at Rice University. Her research interest focuses on topics such as urban and rural spatialities, utopian imaginaries, environmental narratives, displacement and migration. She has published the anthology Judíos/Argentinos/Escritores (1999), 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). She has edited two volumes of essays, Poéticas de los (dis)locamientos (2012) and Utopías urbanas. Geopolítica del deseo en América latina (2013), and was guest editor for the special issue of Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana on “Ecocrítica” (2014). More recently, she co-edited The Latin American Eco-Cultural Reader (2020) and Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema (2021). Her latest fictions are Sophie La Belle (2016); Cocodrilos en la noche (2020); and the bilingual poetry collection El cero móvil de su boca / The Zero Mobile of Its Mouth (2020). She previously served ASLE from 2017-2019 as Diversity Co-Officer.

George Handley is Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Brigham Young University where he has taught for the past 24 years. His books include New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination in Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott, Caribbean Literature and the Environment (co-editor) and Postcolonial Ecologies (co-editor). He has also written an environmental memoir, Home Waters, and a novel, American Fork. His involvement in environmental advocacy includes his current service on the Provo City Council. He previously served ASLE for several years as International Liaison.

Scott Hess is Professor of English and Environmental Sustainability at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. He is the author of William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship: The Roots of Environmentalism in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Univ. of Virginia, 2012) and has recently published essays in American Literature, Modern Language Quarterly (MLQ), and Nineteenth-Century Literature, among others. His current book project, Landscapes of Genius: Author, Nature, Nation and the Transatlantic Origins of Environmentalism, explores how authorial genius became associated during the nineteenth century with specific natural landscapes in both Great Britain and the United States in ways that shaped both modern ideas of nature and the environmental movement. Scott is also currently part of the Indiana Humanities “Unearthed” Speakers Bureau, with his talk “How We Imagine Climate Change and Why It Matters.” He has been a member of ASLE and attended every ASLE conference since 2001, and he chaired the “Eco-Theory” stream for the 2021 ASLE virtual conference.

Jesse Oak Taylor is Associate Professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he currently serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies. His book, The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (2016) won the ASLE book award in ecocriticism. He is also co-editor, with Tobias Menely, of Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times (2017), and numerous other publications on ecocriticism. His current research focuses on science, literature and the emergence of the Anthropocene, as well as an ongoing project on Anthropocene wilderness. Jesse grew up in West Virginia before attending Middlebury College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The mountains are always calling, especially during ski season.

Cassie Galantine is currently a doctoral candidate in the University of Oregon English department. She holds a Master’s degree in English from Northern Arizona University. She is interested in the intersection of environmental justice, medical humanities, and critical race and ethnic studies in U.S. literature and popular culture. Specifically, her current research examines representations of dirt, disease, and racial discourses of hygiene in twentieth-century multiethnic U.S. women’s working-class literature.