Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2020, English

Flora: A Cookbook is a hybrid creative writing project that functions as both a cookbook and a memoir of the author's diagnosis with Crohn's disease, a chronic, inflammatory bowel condition. The project';s 18 recipes are entirely dairy-free in order to match the author's restricted diet. They are connected to stories, which tell of the author';s upbringing, his personal health, his love of food, his Jewish identity, and, more generally, the history of Crohn's disease in the United States. Themes explored in Flora include the visible and invisible body, self-actualization, cultural inheritance, and romantic anxiety.

Committee: Daisy Hernandez (Committee Chair); TaraShea Nesbit (Committee Member); Joseph Bates (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2019, English

This thesis is a collection of both flash memoir and longer creative nonfiction essays centered on the intersections of poverty, girlhood, identity, patriarchy, and secrecy, particularly within the matrilineal line of my family. I reflect on the choices poor women make or are forced to make for their families and the resulting consequences. Specifically, my work examines and comments on the lives of poor women and girls in relation to outside patriarchal forces (such as religion, capitalism, and governmental regulation) that make demands on their lives and create decisions based in survival. My examination of these decisions and forces are based in essays primarily about my mother, my grandmother, and myself and the lives we have led and the decisions we made to hide aspects of our pasts and the shame that followed. By using the essay rather than a traditional narrative memoir form, the pieces are able to inhabit a number of different time periods, tenses, and points of view. The essays convey the enduring repercussions of secrecy, a life of poverty in a trailer park where we lived both without men but also in the shadow of them, with an eye toward discovery and understanding.

Committee: Daisy Hernandez (Committee Chair); TaraShea Nesbit (Committee Member); Joseph Bates (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Master of Fine Arts, University of Akron, 2024, Creative Writing

A woman in middle age has a particular set of concerns—bodily, emotional, sociological, personal—that rise to the top as her children leave home and she contemplates the end of her professional career and the impending death of her parents. Those concerns form the framework for this manuscript which consists of thirteen personal essays on womanhood. Looking backwards, inwards, and ultimately outwards, these essays contemplate the ways she learned about reproduction, her obsession with her hair, the possibility of donating her body to science, her role as a mother, her extended family's obsession with drinking and her own relationship with alcohol, her love of reading and the way it has been passed down through generations of females within her family, her thirty-year marriage, traveling with her now-adult children, teaching for a final year, and watching her parents age. They ask and seek to answer questions around what it means to be a woman in this world, a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother, and someone in the middle of her life. Unpacking the complex truths of human relationships, these essays are interested in laying it all out there, begging forgiveness for the narrator's imperfections, perhaps invoking humor as catharsis, and addressing the personal as a way to make it universal.

Committee: David Giffels (Advisor); Hilary Plum (Committee Member); Caryl Pagel (Committee Member); Mary Biddinger (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, Cleveland State University, 2021, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

The essays contained herein seek to examine the quantity of identities allowed in a life, specifically when the life is female in nature and American in flavor. Not secondarily examined is the quality of freedoms provided within aforesaid examined identities. Methods of examination include sleepless nights, introspection, substance use, religious practice, and, of course, writing. No conclusive results were found, other than that much work remains to be done in the field of American female identity and freedom. Recommendations for further research include a deconstruction of the workday as provided by the Industrial Revolution and a redefining of equality as misunderstood by the middle and upper classes.

Committee: Hilary Plum (Committee Chair); David Giffels (Committee Member); Mary Biddinger PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Composition; Demographics; Evolution and Development; Families and Family Life; Fine Arts; Gender; Gender Studies; Higher Education; Home Economics; Individual and Family Studies; Mental Health; Personal Relationships; Religion; Religious Congregations; Social Structure; Womens Studies

Master of Fine Arts, University of Akron, 2018, Creative Writing

On Writing 2: An Essay Collection and Loose Sequel to Stephen King's On Writing, a creative nonfiction thesis, takes horror and suspense legend Stephen King's memoir on the craft and UPS THE ANTE!!! Eighteen years after the debut of King's nonfiction hit comes the sequel fans have been begging for. Gone are the tales of King's childhood, his lessons on writing, and that time he got hit by a van. Now, read of the essays of a different schmuck, none of which have to do with writing, but do deal with traveling in Key West, volunteering at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, and trying to keep a relationship together at an IKEA. Each essay is handled deftly with a lot of humor and that innate sadness that is key to the human condition. See what the critics are saying about On Writing 2: "This is worse than A Million Little Pieces." — Melvin Goldfarb, New York Times "My son has really disappointed me this time." — Barbara Cibella, Mother of Author Do yourself a favor and download Stephen King's lawyer's favorite thesis of 2018! Get On Writing 2 today! DISCLAIMER: This is a sequel to Stephen King's On Writing in name only. Please do not sue me.

Committee: David Giffels (Advisor) Subjects: American Literature; Composition; Fine Arts; Journalism; Literature; Modern Literature; Political Science

Master of Fine Arts, University of Akron, 2017, Creative Writing

A collection of personal essays

Committee: David Giffels (Advisor); Mary Biddinger MFA, Ph.D. (Committee Member); Varley O'Connor MFA (Committee Member) Subjects: Families and Family Life; Gender; Glbt Studies; Personal Relationships; Religion; Spirituality; Womens Studies

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2010, English: Creative Writing

This thesis is a collection of personal essays that examine the tensions within my identity as a displaced Southerner – both as an Appalachian transplanted to Nashville, and as a Tennessean transplanted to the Midwest. The family of my Indiana-born significant other plays an integral part in these pieces; with them, there is a sense that I should feel at home “back in the country,” since I have traveled from a rural setting (Appalachia) to urban (Nashville) and then back to rural once again. However, I am compelled to illuminate the disparities between his “country” and my “country,” knowing my time in Nashville will color my view of the former. These essays show my struggle to understand myself not only in relation to the places I came from but also with an awareness of the places I have gone to, and of how they have altered that understanding.

Committee: Eric Goodman PhD (Committee Chair); Susan Morgan PhD (Committee Member); Katharine Ronald PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2024, English

On the Love is a hybrid experimental memoir, tracking the speaker's journey towards knowing and embodying Love. As a collage of hybrid texts, the book emulates Love's multidimensionality, allowing it to address spiritual, personal, and political concerns. The book aims at a dynamic openness, discordance and unity, challenging the reader to engage in the journey alongside the speaker, while acknowledging it as never truly complete.

Committee: Keith Tuma (Committee Chair); TaraShea Nesbit (Committee Member); Joseph Bates (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2024, English: Creative Writing

Under Bib & Tucker is a memoir that chronicles the author's exploration of their gender identity alongside their research into the gender identity of Louisa May Alcott. In March of 1860, 8 years before the publication of Little Women, author Louisa May Alcott wrote to her friend Alfred Whitman, “I was born with a boys nature & always had more sympathy for & interest in them than in girls, & have fought my fight for nearly fifteen [years] with a boys spirit under my ‘bib & tucker' & a boys wrath when I got ‘floored[.]'” More than 150 years later, the author discovered this transgender forbear and began to wonder what it would look like to come out for someone in the past. The thesis blends genres such as biography, lyric essay, poetry, speculation, and queer theory to explore this central question.

Committee: TaraShea Nesbit (Committee Chair); Margaret Luongo (Committee Member); Madelyn Detloff (Committee Member) Subjects: Gender Studies; History

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2024, English (Arts and Sciences)

My thesis titled, The Spaces in Between, is a series of essays and multidisciplinary works that center around connection through the process of writing from the body and explore places of liminality in the human experience, particularly of a female identifying human. The works within this collection highlight personal reflections and stories of connection to other people, identities, place, nature, body, time, and space through nonlinear journeys of discovery.

Committee: Eric LeMay (Committee Chair); Courtney Kessel (Committee Member); Apoorva Bradshaw-Mittal (Committee Member) Subjects: Gender Studies; Language Arts; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Educational Studies

“Education and Autobiography: The History, Practice, and Pedagogy of Autobiographical Narrative in Higher Education” explores the intersections of autobiography and education through three major areas: history, creative practice, and pedagogy, each of which is investigated in one of three papers that comprise this dissertation. The first paper, “Programming the Personal,” narrates the disciplinary history of creative nonfiction between the years 1930-2015, detailing how creative nonfiction rose to become a major genre track in graduate creative writing programs. The second paper, “Distance and Desire,” essays the experience of the educated split self and the “feeling” of education by integrating personal narrative with analyses of Tara Westover's Educated and Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory. The third paper, “Stretching the Truth,” explores the limitations of teaching autobiography with pedagogical aims external to literary analysis, such as instilling critical thinking skills or teaching religious experience. These papers are guided by several inquiries: What does it mean to be educated when education fundamentally changes who we are? Which autobiographers have taken up this deep change of education, and how have they narrated it? How is writing autobiographical narrative itself an educative endeavor? What educative possibilities emerge from teaching autobiography, and with them, what limitations? How is it that there is space carved out in our institutions of higher education—a place where we tend towards the objective and the scholarly—where we prioritize teaching the art of personal narrative? By probing this variety of relationships between education and autobiography, this dissertation offers new ways of thinking about how autobiography informs our conceptions and experiences of education, and how education informs our appreciation and practice of autobiography.

Committee: Jackie Blount (Advisor); Lee Martin (Committee Member); Winston Thompson (Committee Co-Chair) Subjects: Education; Education History; Education Philosophy; Literature; Religious Education

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2024, English (Arts and Sciences)

The dissertation is comprised of two sections: a critical essay titled “Queer Temporality in Creative Nonfiction” and a creative nonfiction essay collection titled A Good, Queer Life. The critical essay examines forms contemporary essayists, such as Melissa Febos and Krys Malcolm Belc, use to communicate queer understandings of temporality as nonlinear. The essay posits that queer nonfiction writers experiment with forms like list essays, nonchronological essays, and mixed-media essays to show that, like gender and sexuality, time is a fluid construct. A Good, Queer Life explores how I came to understand my queer identity in my early twenties. The essays address how recognizing my queerness made me return to events in my childhood and young adulthood with a new empathy for my younger self. At the heart of the collection is the desire to conceptualize what a good, queer life—a life that celebrates queerness and attempts to heal from trauma—might look like. The essays explore how queer domestic life differs, wonderfully, from cis- and hetero-normative expectations of what partnership, marriage, and family should look like.

Committee: Eric LeMay (Committee Chair); Katherine Jellison (Committee Member); Carey Snyder (Committee Member); Patrick O'Keeffe (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2023, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

Our Bodies Like Rivers is an essay collection that meditates on the geographical and psychological landscape of home, Appalachia, climate change, and the anxieties and ironies of living in the Anthropocene. From environmental catastrophe, to the opioid crisis, to the plight of consumer, to the health and subtle changes of home and the ones we love, these essays all point to an interconnectedness. Our collective sickness and health is a body of water, without boundary or distinction. This work guides us through the wreckage of modern society and seeks to show us how we might go on.

Committee: Hilary Plum (Advisor); Mary Biddinger (Committee Member); Caryl Pagel (Committee Member) Subjects: Animal Sciences; Climate Change; Cultural Anthropology; Endocrinology; Environmental Philosophy; Environmental Science; Families and Family Life; Fine Arts; Genetics; Geography; Journalism; Toxicology

Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2023, English

1001 Nights Preparing to Die: Meditations in Song and Verse is a memoir in short essays that explores the transformative power of music, spirituality, and the indomitable human spirit. Born with a congenital heart condition obscured by the courts during her adoption, the author's life is marked by countless medical procedures, hospital visits, and the constant shadow of mortality. The author navigates the intricate worlds of chronic illness, adoption, substance misuse, and mental health while discovering the profound healing potential of Kirtan chanting—a form of devotional music originating from the ancient traditions of her husband's home country of India. Through personal anecdotes, introspection, and HinDruid spiritual practices, the memoir explores how the author's engagement with Kirtan becomes a lifeline that reconnects her to her body and provides solace, hope, and acceptance of her mortality. Shedding light on the broader significance of meditative practices in the context of chronic illness and the human experience—and providing a platform for raising awareness and fostering empathy—this work offers compassionate and insightful perspectives on the challenges faced by individuals who are adopted, who live with congenital heart disease, and who live with and love family members with substance misuse disorders.

Committee: TaraShea Nesbitt (Committee Chair); Joseph Bates (Committee Member); Diasy Hernandez (Committee Member) Subjects: Divinity; Earth; Environmental Philosophy; Families and Family Life; Fine Arts; Health; Health Care; Language Arts; Mental Health; Modern Literature; Music; Personal Relationships; Philosophy; Religion; Spirituality; Surgery

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2022, English (Arts and Sciences)

Erasure in the archive is the central focus of this dissertation. Whether it be a sociohistorical erasure, the very construction of history, institutional memory, or personal memory. This work seeks to chronicle the place of my own writing about trauma, erasure, and memory in a larger literary history of utilizing erasure as a means of resistance and truth telling. This dissertation will exist in the electronic archives of Ohio University as a counter-narrative, an alternative impact statement, and a chronicle of the aftermath of a series of sexual assaults and sexual harassment that pervaded the English Department from 2003- 2015, and were denied, ignored, and concealed. The author is one of the survivors of these assaults.

Committee: Eric Lemay (Advisor) Subjects: Fine Arts

Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2022, English

Focused on alternate universes where you can get your car taxidermied, where you can be reincarnated as your neighbor's golden retriever, and where you have conversations with loved ones you've meant to all your life (but couldn't), In This Universe is a collection of branching what-ifs and cosmic could've-beens, a multiverse-jumping selection of short speculative personal essays, lyrical essays, and braided essays that challenges genre conventions and questions the idea of whether a single universe even exists that can accommodate multiple ways of being. Though it deals with many different subject matters, there is always the presence of an alternate universes working as a sort of metaphor for future-thinking and alternate ways of being. Written with the intention of providing a space for folks who don't see themselves as valid in this world, or who can't imagine possibilities for themselves in this world, In This Universe looks to reimagine embodiment and to reshape spaces and ways of being, so that we might discover for ourselves far grander, perhaps far stranger, and mostly hidden possible realities.

Committee: Daisy Hernández (Committee Chair); TaraShea Nesbit (Committee Member); Jody Bates (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

Bachelor of Arts, Wittenberg University, 2022, English

This thesis is a creative nonfiction account of the 2010 murder of Tina Herrmann, Kody Maynard, and Stephanie Sprang, and kidnapping and rape of Sarah Maynard, by Matthew Hoffman. The author read an extensive list of true crime works to prepare for this project. True crime is a genre that, for centuries was not regarded with the same literary importance as others, yet it is an exceptional indicator of what society values at a given point in time. The recent surge in true crime fascination is not isolated, but rather has occurred many times throughout history and can serve as an indicator of conflict. The voices and narratives that are now more prevalent in crime writing change how we address crime and the very nature of our language surrounding it. The author critiques some of the tendencies found in true crime novels such as In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, including using the passive voice to distance the responsible body from the crime, which this project seeks to avoid.

Committee: Michael McClelland (Advisor); Erin Hill (Committee Member); Andrew Graff (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Composition; Criminology; Fine Arts; Journalism; Literature; Modern Literature

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2022, English

Paper House is a collection of creative nonfiction essays about coming of age as an Asian American biracial and bisexual woman in China. The narrator goes to China to teach English in rural Shanxi Province for 2 years and struggles with her own loss of Chinese culture, and the loss of her Chinese grandmother who died before she was born. Through her daily life in China and visiting places her grandmother lived, the narrator tries to understand a homeland that she's been displaced from. Additionally, she attempts to navigate her in-between identities — biracial and bisexual within cultural contexts she is largely unfamiliar with, endeavoring to find a place where she feels like she belongs. Being perceived as an outsider, and the growing distance from her U.S.-based girlfriend amplifies loneliness. Ultimately, the narrator learns to accept care from strangers, her cat, and a constellation of women, and gains knowledge of self from family and ancestors. The prose holds tension between absence and abundance and moves patiently through scenes and images with a lyrical voice.

Committee: Elissa Washuta (Advisor); Michelle Herman (Committee Member) Subjects: Asian Literature; Language Arts; Literature

Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2021, English

You and Me, Always is a triptych of essays in fragmented, experimental forms that explores the author's relationship with their mother, the mother's history with strokes, ambiguous loss, and the nuanced differences in how “I miss you” is conveyed in Spanish, French, and Vietnamese. Essay One strings together patches of memory, ruminations on ambiguous loss, and dissections of the Spanish phrases “te extrano,” “me haces falta,” and “te echo de menos” to contrast the strangeness of the mother's condition with the author's memories of her. Essay Two explores themes of loss, excess, and emptiness through a consideration of the French phrase “tu me manques” and the author's own tendency to lose both tangible and intangible things. Essay Three includes ruminations on the Vietnamese word “nho” and muscle memory as they relate to the author's journey with making curry, a dish their mother is famous for in the family. Modeled after traditional triptych displays that are paneled, two “hinges” separate the three essays and are comprised of short prose-poem pieces in direct address from the author to their mother, giving readers a closer look into their relationship and deeper insight into the author's complex emotions regarding the ambiguous loss.

Committee: Daisy Hernández (Committee Chair); Anita Mannur (Committee Member); Joseph Bates (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

BA, Kent State University, 2021, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

People often keep quiet about issues that are affecting them. This is even more so with young LGBTQ+ people, who are afraid of being ostracized by those around them. I am one of those people, and I chose to no longer be quiet about what I feel inside, and write a piece of creative nonfiction that expresses not just my exploration of gender, but my exploration of identity in general throughout my life.

Committee: James Winter Ph.D. (Advisor); Sarah Smiley Ph.D. (Committee Member); Barbara George Ph.D. (Committee Member); Rachael Blasiman Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts; Gender; Literature