Short stories

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.

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?

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.

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.

Strategies of Disconnection is short story collection focusing on memes or rather the intersection of modern internet meme culture, meme theory, and Christianity, capturing the realities of an era of memetic upheaval (in 2016 the search term “Meme” overtook the term “Jesus” in popularity) when the digital and the spiritual seem to overlap, both contending for attention. Memes are culturally analogous to genes, both serving as entities driven toward survival and reproduction. Yet, and entities analogous to genes, memes find themselves contending for survival. These stories inhabit the perspective of memes as characters attempting to acknowledge existence alongside their genetic counterparts: An unnamed creator who falls for Lucy, the first set of hominid bones, an actor who avoids notoriety after having played the role of god, and internet troll Anon, who lives on 4chan.

Between Us and All is a collection of fictional stories addressing themes of gender, religion, family, class, and sexuality. A portion of this manuscript is a linked collection of short stories, following the fictional Kelly/Sullivan family through their daily lives in the Coal Region of Pennsylvania.

Yesterday Will Come is a hybrid collection of linked short stories that focuses on the way a particular family passes down the family history through physical and emotional memories. The collection largely focuses on the process of making and preserving memories and how the lack of control over one’s memory can lead to paranoia and displacement in their life. Particular value is attached to certain memories and the value and emotion attached can at times overwrite the actual content of the memory. The stories center around the Riviera family and particularly Ana Riviera’s life as she considers the many aspects of her family history she continues to inherit and the comfort and paranoia she associates with such inheritance.

All My Sins is a collection of short fiction. The stories feature characters from Florida struggling with family, sexuality, masculinity, ethics, and themselves.

Cauterizing Tide is a collection of short fiction. The stories feature characters struggling with managing or creating healthy relationships. Characters wrestle with their feelings about family, love, anger, longing, and addiction.