Fiction

A collection of stories exploring the intersection of queerness, latinidad, spirituality, and the generational impact of storytelling. This collection aims to examine the relationships between religion, tradition, politics, and the concept of culture as it crosses borders through a fictional mythos. Many of these stories reflect the hopes, desires, and anxieties of young Latinx individuals across the Americas while expanding and evolving the definition of Latin American literature.

Blood Drive and Other Stories is a collection of fictional works. It includes stories that take place in South Florida or are inspired by the landscape of it. The themes within each vary from the limits one is willing to go to enact small-town justice, the need to conserve consciousness, adapting to age, living with medication, and the desire to burn everything down.

Feed is a novel set in a fictional post-revolutionary Nebraska, at a time when the developments and progress of the revolution begins to come into question. The former revolutionaries must dive into an internet-like database, referred to as the Feed, in order to unearth memories critical to their survival.

All Return is a short story collection centered on nostalgia, and the desire of going back to a place or time, which sometimes doesn’t exist anymore. The characters that populate the collection, are all returning or trying to go back, either to a physical place, a language, to an age of innocence, or to loved ones.
While the book tries to portray stories of immigrant lives in parts of collection, the desire of immigrants to sometimes return to their countries of origin are not exclusive to them, but universal. The stories in All Return remind us that we are all going back, or long for a place or time that exists without us.

The story, This Kind of Trouble, follows the life of its protagonists, Margaret, a 65-year-old woman living with schizoaffective-disorder in 2012 Nigeria, and her estranged husband, Benjamin, a White presenting man born to mixed raced father. Although Margaret exudes class privilege, she pursues in her retired years a kind of desperate anonymity, often complicated by echoes of her past: an ex-husband, and the haunted past of an unforgivable crime from which they must now seek absolution.
Indeed, the story attempts to invert the discourse on illness and assimilation, as well as on race and citizenship. It does this by tackling the themes of colonialism, cultural identity, and the formulations of the Immigrant v Expatriate trope. Essentially, through this work I ask two critical questions: how has colonial mental constructs travelled over time, and how does a person become Black in the global Western imaginary?

Enclaves is a fiction novel set on an Earth ravaged by climate change and follows characters trying to find meaning in a life constantly threatened by weather. It addresses themes of adventure, death, competition, and capitalistic consequence.

Rat Mouth is a collection of fictional stories that speak to the absurdity of girlhood. These stories focus on the precarious situations women are put into when their physical bodies are valued more than their internal lives.

The Dreams of Gods is a surreal-realist novel that follows a grieving man in the wake of his wife’s death through a strange conspiracy that seems to bend reality around him, forcing him on a curious odyssey of self-discovery, eventually leading to understanding as he learns how to come to terms with himself and the world around him. It is an exploration of the many faces of god and the universe, as well as humanity's place within it all. Inventive and energetic, the hairbrained plot takes the reader deep into a world that becomes more bizarre with each page, while fantastical characters pop in and out of the story in shocking and comical ways and nothing is quite what it seems.

This thesis/novel, The Marvelous Garden of Marcel Verdell, follows the fictional story of one local government bureaucrat, Jude Wintertour, into the irregular and viridescent town of Garden, wherein he encounters the titular gardener, Marcel Verdell, and, along with a host of other residents, confronts the oppressive, convoluted past, envisions a hopeful future, and lives with the consequences of the blindsight-choices of the present.

Through a Glass Darkly is about grief, ghosts, monsters, and mothers. To be more specific, it is a haunted story about the silencing of women, particularly female authors. Its roots draw inspiration from a darker version of Mary Shelley, and the lives of female authors before and after her. While researching Evelyn Buchanan, a socialite from the nineteenth century, Ophelia Williams becomes infected by an otherworldly house with a history. As her narrative intertwines with the fragmented findings of Evelyn and Evelyn’s mysteriously stolen novel, Ophelia experiences postpartum psychosis, brought on by her own complicated family history and personal trauma. Together, Ophelia and her ghosts work to unsilence Evelyn Buchannan. To do this, she and they must rise above their own versions of grief, or what time has painted as monstrous hysteria.