Creative writing

“Midsummer Night’s Poems”—as the thesis’ title suggests—is based on Shakespeare’s play, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The thesis’ poems reflect a very dream-like state of progression, starting with overall harmony in terms of relationships and followed by the consequences resulting from immature love’s fickle nature. The poems, however, are not meant to be read as grave or humorless even though their tone is sometimes overdramatized. The poems’ tone is lighthearted, while engaging the suffering of love’s hardships. It keeps the reader’s perspective comparable to Bottom’s. The thesis’ message is that we should not take ourselves so seriously. Finally, the thesis’ poems act as a mirror to Shakespeare’s play since common themes emerge in both. In sum, the thesis’ tone shadows the lightheartedness of the play’s and yet conveys that while “The course of true love never did run smooth,” true love always finds a way to bring us peace.

Aggregate is a collection of short stories that chronicle the coming of age of its first-person narrator. He is a half Indian, half American boy who lived in 1990s New York City. The stories begin in childhood and run into his early twenties. They illustrate his experiences growing up and being othered in different ways. Themes of neglect, addiction, sexual assault, and violence create a cycle of abuse that repeats throughout his life.
Each story can be read as a standalone piece, but when taken together they become a tapestry of trauma and a life of addiction. These stories aim to highlight the connection between trauma and addiction.

Book Where Every Poem is a Spoke on a Wheel of the Party Wagon is a collection of poems that experiment with formal poetic structures to challenge abusive familial and religious structures, repurposing faithful sensibility to empower an irreverent speaker. Poems in this collection rewrite prayers, revise the outcomes of familial estrangement, and recollect history in order to reclaim the author’s queer American childhood, adulthood, and Catholic faith traditions.

They Don’t Disappear is an alternate history novel following Bess and Harry Houdini’s lives after Houdini does not die from appendicitis in 1926. The novel addresses themes of belief, and the hope that intimacy—in all its forms—might be an antidote for trauma, violence and hate.

“Small Stories” offers a glimpse of the kinds of stories that risk going unknown: stories of historical Africa and its sustained influence on the present and future, voices of women, community, and communal resistance to expulsion from history. At a macro level, the intent of this collection is to demand diversity and inclusivity in the modern literary, social, and academic culture. Rethinking history by inaugurating a wider set of evidentiary sources from the past does not mean escaping to a complete amnesia about the current position of Africans in literary arts, but recognizing that no single form of historical evidence can be used to accurately incorporate our story into literature

Yesterday We Were Girls is a body of work which includes photographs selected from family albums and current images I create based in and around my childhood and adolescent memories. The photographs are accompanied by porcelain recreations of precious girlhood treasures, handwritten poetic prose, and an installation which also includes found furniture and a large open book form. Focused on my lived experience of the tension between intimacy and distance, acceptance and rejection, as well as the hidden and that which is laid bare, this body of work is an exploration of identity, female life cycles, family history, and mother – daughter relationships.

These Things Leave Traces is a collection of essays, some lyric, centered on themes of control, consent, feminism, and ethics. Reflecting on personal experience and drawing from fairy tales, this collection explores the ways in which trauma manifests and, further, how these traces of trauma can be found both in a body and in a body of work.

Journalists are supposed to stay neutral. But, when it comes to reporting on a viral protest against a gay conversion therapy program, young, lesbian reporter Anna Mitchell isn’t so sure she agrees with what’s neutral anymore. Gay Christian Speed Dating takes place in Iowa City, Iowa and follows Anna Mitchell, who has moved in with her parents after getting laid off from her prestigious breaking news job. When performance artist college kids go viral protesting a local gay conversion therapy program, it might be Anna’s one shot to get back in the journalism game. But Anna has conflicts of interest: a crush on the girl who is leading the protest, and, even worse, her own opinions on the subject matter that she can’t seem to keep from spilling. This contemporary new adult novel is 42,000 words in a tone of The Great Believers meets Priestdaddy.

This thesis is a novel that takes formal cues from works such as Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual. The work takes two separate forms in its chapters; the first being more traditional narrative chapters that follow a set of characters as they explore the surreal landscape of the titular Hotel, and the second are akin to flash fiction pieces that describe individual rooms in the Hotel. Together the narrative attempts to address issues of class and the way that capitalism subsumes people’s identities, as well as the potential of the natural world using leftist politics as a lens for this critique.