Priscilla Solis Ybarra is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of North Texas, specializing in Chicana/o Literature and Theory as well as Environmental Literature and Ecocriticism.  Her book Writing the Goodlife: Mexican American Literature and the Environment was published in March 2016 by the University of Arizona Press. It is the first study to engage a long-range environmental literary history of Chicana/o writing.  Dr. Ybarra's essay, "Erasure by U.S. Legislation: Ruiz de Burton's Nineteenth-Century Novels and the Lost Archive of Mexican American Environmental Knowledge," is in the collection Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century.  Dr. Ybarra also published an article in the June 2009 issue of the journal MELUS titled "Borderlands as Bioregion: Jovita González, Gloria Anzaldúa, and the Twentieth Century Ecological Revolution in the Rio Grande Valley."  

Dr. Ybarra's most recent invited public appearance took place at UNT on the Square, UNT's gallery space in the heart of Denton, Texas. Ybarra's lecture kicked off the 2016-2017 La Colectiva Lecture Series. La Colectiva is a women of color faculty mentoring group in which Ybarra has participated since its start in 2012. Other recent appearances include invitations to speak at the Harwood Museum at Taos, at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment Symposium at Western New Mexico University, and at the Museum of Heritage and Arts in Los Lunas, New Mexico. In the Summer of 2016, she was an Aldo and Estella Leopold Writer in Residence at Tres Piedras, New Mexico,  where she researched and wrote about the life of Estella Elvira Luna Bergere Leopold and her contributions to American environmentalism. Her next public appearance will be October 6, 2016 at Rice University in Houston, Texas where she will be speaking on her research connecting Mexican American culture and writing with environmental issues and social justice. Another recent appearance was at Point Reyes Station, California in March 2015. There she was honored to join leading environmental writers Kathleen Dean Moore, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Carolyn Finney, Camille Dungy, Lauret Savoy, Ann Pancake, Gretel Ehrlich, Rebecca Solnit, Robert Hass, and Kim Stanley Robinson for the event "Mapping a New Geography of Hope: Women and the Land." Other invited lectures include visits to Utah Valley University, Stephen F. Austin University and the University of Nevada, Reno.  International invited academic engagements include Stockholm, Sweden (September 2015), Bucharest, Romania (May 2012), Japan (Summer 2010), and Edinburgh, UK (November 2009).  Dr. Ybarra has also presented talks at various national and international conferences, including the Modern Language Association, American Studies Association, Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies, Western Literature Association, Congreso Internacional de Literatura Chicana, and the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis.  

She has taught courses for the Departments of English at Texas Tech University, Rice University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and for American Studies at Yale University.  She currently teaches courses on Chicana/o Literature and environmental literary studies at the University of North Texas. She currently serves on the board of directors for Orion Magazine, and she served as Diversity Officer for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment for several years.