Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, 2020, Creative Writing/Poetry

Southern Revisions examines the process of death and agricultural rebirth in southern rural Appalachia—how these concepts are experienced, portrayed, and how they can shape the mentality of the inhabitants who grow up there. There are sub-themes in the collection of place and family/inheritance, though these are often woven into the larger fabric of death, rebirth, and work. This collection asks questions such as: can an intimate experience with death shake loose apathy and encourage introspection and growth; how does place shape both our identity and our experience with our identity; is leaving a place a necessary part of healing; and what is more impactful—to leave a place that's in conflict with one's beliefs, or to stay and demand change? This collection utilizes narrative lyricism to portray Southern Appalachia in a way that uses lived experience, transgenerational knowledge, and a keen yet sympathetic eye to paint a rural scene that is as beautiful as it is heart wrenching. While the first section centers around childhood, difference, and understanding death, the second portrays scenes of negotiating trauma, learning love, and returning home to create a series that is emotionally heavy yet balanced. Ultimately, these poems center around the way a place both takes from and sustains us until it becomes our turn to be folded back into the earth.

Committee: Frank Rzicznek (Advisor); Rebecca Frank (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts; Language Arts

Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Bowling Green State University, 2019, Creative Writing/Poetry

This poetry collection explores what it means to be a woman in a dangerous world. The poems cover themes like rape, sexual coercion, compulsory motherhood, and violence against women and girls. Set mostly in the rural American South, the poems examine what it's like to come of age as a young girl growing up in poverty around Opioid and alcohol abuse, and how that abuse destroys families. The poems exist between a real world and an otherworld where women and girls walk the land. They search for each other sending messages through static and from the bottoms of the river. This manuscript examines the nature of agency in a world where women's bodies and minds are still objectified and devalued. Magnolia Canopy Otherworld is split into three sections, each expanding on the last with many of the themes and images repeating and linking together, and the section breaks in this manuscript exist as pauses. Though the work is not strictly confessional, many of the speakers and settings in these poems are inspired by my life, and the lives of the women and girls I grew up around, and stories I read about in the news.

Committee: Frank Rzicznek MFA (Advisor); Rebecca Frank Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Gender; Literature

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2001, Arts and Sciences : English and Comparative Literature

This dissertation, Hanging Big Mary and Other Poems, is a collection of original poems by the author, Juliana Gray Vice. The poems address a range of subject matters and themes, though they are bound by a strong sense of voice and Southern identity. Ecology, race, history and personal autobiography are among the subjects addressed. A range of poetic forms is also used, including blank verse, formal sonnets, and free verse. The dissertation also includes a critical paper, "Beholding Nothing: Wallace Stevens's Paradox of the Imagination in 'The Snow Man' and 'The Plain Sense of Things.'" This paper uses these two poems, written at opposite ends of Stevens's career, to illustrate Stevens's ongoing struggle with the paradox of using the metaphor of poetry to express a reality without metaphors, and the development of his ideas over the span of his career.

Committee: Andrew Hudgins (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, American