UF Center for Latin American Studies
Creative writing, philosophy and history of science & technology, ecocriticism.
Mexico, Colombia, Southern Africa
Dr. Luis Felipe Lomelí studied Physics Engineering with a specialization in Biotechnology, a M.Sc. in Ecology of Arid Zones, and received a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies of Science and Technology from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and a Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese from the University of Kansas. He has taught at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey and Universidad Iberoamericana-Puebla. He has received grants and fellowships from the Organization of American States, Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (Mexico), Fundación para las Letras Mexicanas, and Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (Mexico), among others. He has been a writer-in-residence in Colombia and South Africa. Since 2012, he is a fellow of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte in Mexico.
Lomelí’s creative writing and research is focused on human-nature relations and on how our concepts and performances of love, violence, income, technology, care, desire, and knowledge modify these relationships. He is the author of more than a dozen fiction and non-fiction books, including novels, short story collections, and essays. As an editor, he has published five anthologies of Mexican and Latin American short stories.
Among other prizes, he has been awarded twice with the Premio Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico, the first time in 2001 for a short story collection, Todos santos de California, and the second in 2018 for a creative essay, Estética de la penuria. The action of both books takes place in the southern part of the Lower California Peninsula, but while the former focuses on the violent intersection of neoliberalism, drug trafficking, and environmentalism by the turn of the 21th century, the later examines the ecological and social collapse of Western civilization in arid zone settlements during the 1700s.
Currently, Lomelí is interested in the study of the appearance of plant species in literature and the landscape as live markers—or living memory— of the processes of migration of human communities and knowledges. He is the author of one of the shortest flash fictions in world’s literature:
The Emigrant
—Forgetting something?
—If only.
