Santiago Acosta is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. He specializes in modern and contemporary Latin American literature and visual arts, which he examines through the lenses of cultural studies, political economy, and environmental theory.

His book manuscript, We Are Like Oil: An Ecology of the Venezuelan Culture Boom, explores how literature and the visual arts interacted with the environmental impacts of the 1970s oil boom in Venezuela. He is also the co-editor of the volume Ecopoéticas y políticas ecológicas desde el Sur (under contract at Brill). In 2021-23, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at SUNY Old Westbury, where he helped launch the institution’s new Environmental Studies degree. At Yale, Acosta is a core member of the Environmental Humanities Steering Committee, a Whitney Humanities Center Fellow (2024-25), and part of the faculty board at The Creative Forum.

Acosta is also an award-winning poet. His poetry collection El próximo desierto (The Coming Desert) earned him the José Emilio Pacheco Literature Prize “Ciudad y Naturaleza,” awarded by the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL) and the Museum of Environmental Sciences of the University of Guadalajara. He has received support from the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program and was an invited poet at the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP26. While in Caracas, he co-founded the poetry journal El Salmón, which won a National Book Award. In 2024, Spain’s Visor Libros released a collection of his selected poetry, La desesperanza (Hopelessness).

News and latest updates:

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The special issue “World-Ecology in Latin America: From Below and to the Left,” that I co-edited with Brian Whitener, Paige Andersson, Victoria Saramago, and Orlando Bentancor, just came out in Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group . It

The special issue “World-Ecology in Latin America: From Below and to the Left,” that I co-edited with Brian Whitener, Paige Andersson, Victoria Saramago, and Orlando Bentancor, just came out in Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group. It features articles on abstract kinetic art, hydroelectric dams, social reproduction, extractive violence, speculative fiction, and so much more. Check it out!: https://mediationsjournal.org. Download the PDF here.

I’ll be in LA at the Petrocultures conference. My panel is titled South American Energy Humanities: Minerals, Nitrate, Oil, Wind and Water , with Victoria Saramago, Azucena Castro, and Gianfranco Selgas. Come say hi!

I’ll be in LA at the Petrocultures conference. My panel is titled South American Energy Humanities: Minerals, Nitrate, Oil, Wind and Water, with Victoria Saramago, Azucena Castro, and Gianfranco Selgas. Come say hi!

See you soon at the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) congress in Bogotá! I’ll be in two panels: Poesía e imaginación política en América Latina (June 12, 2:00-3:30 pm) and New Approaches to Venezuelan Studies I (June 15, 12:10-1:40 pm).

See you soon at the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) congress in Bogotá! I’ll be in two panels: Poesía e imaginación política en América Latina (June 12, 2:00-3:30 pm) and New Approaches to Venezuelan Studies I (June 15, 12:10-1:40 pm).

It’s out! My poetry anthology, La desesperanza , has just been published in Spain by Visor Libros. Get it here or here .

It’s out! My poetry anthology, La desesperanza, has just been published in Spain by Visor Libros. Get it here or here.

My poem “The Policeman’s Son” just came out on Poetry Northwest , translated by Tiffany Troy and the Women in Translation Project.

My poem “The Policeman’s Son” just came out on Poetry Northwest, translated by Tiffany Troy and the Women in Translation Project.

On January 12, I was invited to participate in the Environmental Humanities Workshop at Stanford, focusing on “Transdisciplinary Efforts in the Face of Environmental Challenges.” In my talk, titled “Ecopoetry and the Critique of the Present,” I ad

On January 12, I was invited to participate in the Environmental Humanities Workshop at Stanford, focusing on “Transdisciplinary Efforts in the Face of Environmental Challenges.” In my talk, titled “Ecopoetry and the Critique of the Present,” I advocated for poetry as a powerful form of contemporary critique in the face of climate change, proposing a continuum where theory, research, and poetry mutually inform and sustain each other.