Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, 2018, Creative Writing/Fiction

It's 2016 and the nameless narrator breaks into his ex-wife's house to retrieve a taxidermied badger, a way to regain a small measure of control in his life. Feeling confident after retrieving the badger, he decides to revisit his old haunt, The Lucky Clover, where rawboned and rough characters await him, principally Nanny, a six-foot redheaded amateur madam with a penchant for meth binges. One night the narrator discovers and takes a sizable amount of cocaine, is marked for death by Ray Kennedy, a man haunted by his own racial background. The narrator then turns to crime to repay the debt, only to find he's been a pawn in game where violence is the only possible conclusion.

Committee: Wendell Mayo (Advisor); Lawrence Coates (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; Fine Arts; Literature; Modern Literature

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, Youngstown State University, 2017, Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts (Creative Writing)

This collection of thematically and geographically linked stories takes place in the fictional northeast Ohio town of Miles Junction and the surrounding area, including the real city of Youngstown, and explores a number of experiences within the working-class culture. Violence, revenge, financial insecurity, family dysfunction, love, forgiveness, and addiction are among the many themes running throughout the text. Set against a backdrop of deindustrialization and economic depression in the last few decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the new millennium, these stories employ a number of different literary modes—including American Gothic, noir, coming-of-age, and “dirty” domestic realism—in order to examine the tensions not only between individuals and groups but also between the past and the present and how these tensions govern our choices and trajectory as we move into the future.

Committee: Christopher Barzak MFA (Advisor); Steven Reese PhD (Committee Member); Eric Wasserman MFA (Committee Member) Subjects: Economics; Families and Family Life; Literature

Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, 2016, Creative Writing/Fiction

Warp and Woof is a story collection primarily governed by non-linear, woven story forms. My interest in forms that draw attention to the artifice of story is inherently tied to a love for the oral tradition I grew up with in rural Pennsylvania and, more broadly, northern Appalachia. The way that stories told aloud wind and weave creates a kind of atmospheric cloud that's as much about the telling as it is the words themselves. In my study, woven story forms seem to best emulate that atmosphere. What's more, Warp and Woof's subjects and characters are tied to the same region as its forms, making this as much a collection of place as it is one of structural experimentation. Here are hills, forests, small farms, and animals; dirt tracks, and Sunday School, 4-H, and dogs chained long in kennels. The characters at the center of the stories that make up Warp and Woof are necessarily struggling in search of a personal narrative, a metaphor. The weaving of different times, voices, and points of view provides the reader with a system of symbols for understanding this search on a built-in, experiential level, even if the characters never find what they're looking for.

Committee: Wendell Mayo Dr. (Advisor); Lawrence Coates Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, 2015, Creative Writing/Fiction

Pig Iron is a study of Appalachia, of the land and the people. The land comes first, because it is a place where the environment so heavily informs the attitudes and behaviors of its occupants. Appalachia is a land that was settled by escaped slaves, convicts, and other societal outcasts. These were rough and unlearned frontiersman and their families who scraped a meager living from a harsh world and were grateful because it meant being free from a society that did not want or value them. That rebel spirit survives in these stories. In my fiction I've attempted to synthesize the essentials of this unique terrain and the people who call it home. These characters are ugly and flawed. Morality is a luxury they cannot afford to indulge. My stories deal with many themes common to literary fiction—death, violence, loss, shame, and pride—but it focuses these themes through an Appalachian lens.

Committee: Wendell Mayo PhD (Advisor); Lawrence Coates PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2014, English

Comprised of three short stories and the first section of a novel, all set in small towns across the eastern United States, this collection of fiction explores the disparate voices of the people who live there, from teenagers obsessed with fantasy, a widowed shipbuilder, to a man who watches his long ago, high school crush from the back of a strip club. Also included is an introductory, critical essay about fiction's organic nature and why honesty is important in an inherently dishonest art.

Committee: Kevin Haworth (Advisor) Subjects: Literature