Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 0, English (Arts and Sciences)

In this lyrical childhood memoir, I reconstruct my experience of my parent's explosive divorce. The manuscript begins and ends in court, where at 12 I testified I no longer wanted to continue my relationship with my father. It is a moment that exists outside of linear time for me. To mimic the experience of trauma, I loop back to this scene throughout the book, each time getting closer to the moment I speak my truth. Between these courtroom sections, I flash back (and forward) to examine the relationship I had with both my parents and the relationship they had with each other, trying to make what sense I can of the way things fell apart. Written from the perspective of my younger self, I elevate the child's voice because, during all this, that voice was often not counted. As subtly as possible to avoid disrupting the reader's occupation of the child's point of view, I invite my adult perspective when necessary to provide context or future insight. At its heart, this book seeks to show that, while lacking language or the ability to articulate an experience, a child is a full person whose experience of situations is no less complex or human than that of the adults around her.

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.

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2021, Educational Leadership

The purpose of this qualitative, arts-based research study was to understand new arrival students' experience, meaning making, and opportunity for developing intellectual self-trust during an illustrated memoir project. The project was set during the school day, in a high school, English Language Learners classroom with the aim of centering new arrival students' lived experience and unique funds of knowledge in their academic setting. A year long pilot study informed the design of the final research study. The dissertation study engaged 13 students from 10 different countries ranging in age from 14-19. All 12 participants who remained throughout the school year completed a minimum 24-page illustrated memoir. Narrative analysis and visual analysis of student memoirs, combined with thematic analysis of researcher journals and informal interviews provided insight into participant experience, meaning making, and the project's potential to foster intellectual self-trust. Recommendations for future research in this area include scaffolding additional curricular activities to reinforce and enhance intellectual self-trust, adopting illustrated memoir making and hands-on visual art learning as a classroom pedagogy, and planned opportunities for peer-to-peer mentoring. The study provides an example of how an illustrated memoir-making project can further the development of intellectual self-trust on the part of new arrival high school students.

Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2018, English

Close Quarters is a coming of age memoir that spans four years in the life of the protagonist as she witnesses the dissolution of her biological family, orchestrates the assemblage of a new type of family composed of her coworkers, and discovers her sexuality after falling in love in the kitchen of a Michigan Wendy's. Throughout the four years during which she works at Wendy's, she finds herself repeatedly faced with the same choice: to believe her presence in the lives of the people she cares about makes a difference, or to cut ties with everyone she's known at Wendy's in favor of pursuing her dream of moving out of state to attend graduate school. Throughout the journey of the protagonist, Wendy's serves an extended metaphor for “home.”

MFA, Kent State University, 2010, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

My thesis, Half a Dream, a road trip memoir, is framed by a physical journey, driving in the summer of 2007 across the United States in a five-speed Toyota Matrix with my three young sons, then ages 13, 10 and 7. The road trip provides the framework for looping back in time and place to the key emotional experiences that are the real subject of my memoir. In the course of this dual narrative and emotional journey, endings ignite beginnings and even instigate the revisiting of decades-old endings (especially of familial relationships) that reach through time and demand re-evaluation. The results of these re-evaluations sometimes lead, figuratively speaking, to leaving behind people and, at other times, leaving behind old injuries in order to re-create long-held relationships.

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.

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.

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2022, English

Setting the Table: Ethos-As-Relationship in Food Writing employs methods from rhetoric and technical and professional communication to argue that the rhetorical mode of ethos should be understood as fundamentally relational, rather than as a more discreet property of communication synonymous with the rhetor's authority or character. I argue that reconceiving ethos-as-relationship better accounts for the rhetorical strategies used by the food writers who identify as women, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and/or as part of the LGBTQ+ community whose texts I analyze, which include food memoirs, decolonial cookbooks, and food blogs. Food writing is a valuable place to examine the development of ethos because food writers are especially attuned to hospitality, a structural metaphor that all rhetors can use as a framework for understanding their relationship to their audience. A key focus of my analysis is the development of these food writers' textual personas, or their self-portrayal within the text. Textual personas are crucial to the development of what I call the ethotic relationship between writers and readers because a reader is unlikely to meet the writer in person, and an ethotic relationship can only be formed with another party. Ethos-as-relationship has important implications for understanding expertise and professional identity, especially for those rhetors who occupy historically-marginalized positionalities, as they must often work harder to negotiate a position of authority in relation to their audiences.

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.

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2021, Art

Like Floating in Dark Waters explores the psychological and material experience of living in and with bodies. A short story runs down the left side of the page, weaving together personal narrative, fiction, and magical realism. On the right side of the page, I have included a collection of my work and material processes documented through photographs and text. These two parts run parallel. They do not illustrate or narrate one another, but feed and reflect each other. I draw from my experiences as a daughter, a woman, a lover, a caregiver, and someone inhabiting a living and dying body, grappling with how we experience the processes of growing, emptying out, and breaking down. It is a work about the loneliness, longing, and tenderness within intimate relationships. A reflection on the edges of the body, how they meet the material world and the ways we bridge the space between bodies. Like Floating in Dark Waters imagines new forms of grieving, tending, and healing.

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.

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2021, English

The Kirkbride plan for American mental hospitals first took hold in the late 1840s and remained the most popular floor plan for insane asylums for the next forty years. Kirkbride asylums were considered vital, scientifically advanced centers of mental health treatment throughout the nineteenth century, but quickly became outdated, overcrowded, understaffed, and dilapidated. Today only about one-third of the original Kirkbride buildings constructed from the 1840s to the 1890s remain standing, but their impact on the national imagination is both enormous and permanent. This thesis for the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at The Ohio State University is a combination of memoir and literary journalism documenting the origins, lifespan, decline, and historic preservation of Kirkbride asylums around the continental United States, as well as the author's own experiences with bipolar disorder and psychiatric care.

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2021, Environmental Studies

As an English and Environmental Studies double major, I merged my passions for writing and ecology into a two-part creative thesis manuscript. During the summer of 2020, I interviewed three female environmental writers about their insights into the publishing world and what they perceived to be a woman's place in American conservation literature. I detail and analyze these women's personal perspectives, each of whom addressed the different impacts of sexism and ageism on their careers. This qualitative analysis then serves as a critical introduction to my creative work, in which I intertwine climate science with personal memoir to create a collection of four nonfiction essays. Each essay combines my attachment to the outdoors and our ailing planet with reflections on corporeal boundaries and emotional resilience as a woman today, experiencing and surviving the seasons of a pandemic.

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

Laughing at the End of the World is a memoir about failure and struggle in one's search for purpose. The story details the author's time breaking into the standup comedy scene of northeast Ohio, the friendships forged throughout his journey, and the sacrifices made in his quest for personal fulfillment. This work merges the format of the novel with the author's personal experience to form a cohesive nonfiction narrative and draws heavy inspiration from the memoirs of Mary Karr, Dave Eggers, and Harry Crews. Laughing at the End of the World was crafted using the author's extensive collection of journal entries, performance recordings, setlists, joke notebooks, social media posts, and memories.

Master of Arts, University of Akron, 2021, English-Composition

In this text, I examine the relationship of three concepts: healing, lived writing process, and the making of knowledge. This inquiry blends theory and practice, and it is situated within Black life writing. I situate my inquiry accordingly not to produce a collapsed framework of “racial healing,” but to show how Black life writing, while marginalized, is yet central. Though other scholarly work on healing and the writing process exists, I argue for a greater recognition of what I call "the lived writing process." I also argue that the lived writing process—as demonstrated by Black composition scholars—embodies healing and transformative knowledge-making, particularly within ethnography. Within the depth of this tradition, we may observe, grapple with, and universally consider what it means to heal.

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2021, English (Rhetoric and Writing) PhD

It is believed that over 90% of sexual violence cases involve situations in which a victim knows their attacker. Yet, cultural depictions of sexual assault and rape focus primarily on furthering the violent `stranger-in-the-alley' narrative, than representing the majority of victim's lived experiences. This disconnect contributes to many victims of sexual assault, specifically within romantic relationships or friendships, struggling to recognize what happened to them as rape or as something else. Researchers refer to this as rape ambiguity or unacknowledged rape, where a victim cannot define what happened and thus internalizes victim-blaming rape myths. Yet, the role of relational context is rarely acknowledged in examining this disconnect, and the impact this has on recognizing and naming experiences is broadly overlooked. Blending an evocative autoethnographic method – detailing the author's personal experience with sexual abuse within relationships – with the findings from qualitative community-based research, this project asks how sexual abuse has become normalized in intimate heterosexual relationships and what impact this has on a female victim's ability to name her experiences. Grounded in feminist theory and utilizing The Listening Guide, participant narratives are presented in the form of voice poems, with a critical focus on language. Findings highlight a trend of male-centric relationship dynamics, manipulation, and sexual coercion as normalized within heterosexual relationships. Additionally, the rhetorical discourse of sexual assault and rape as inherently violent is cited as a disruption to naming experiences as either term, due at least in part to concern over labeling male partners rapists. Implications of this research suggest a greater need for gender equality in heterosexual relationships – with a specific need for consent communication to involve sex positivity grounded in the normalization of female (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, English

Disability Memoir: A Study in Pedagogy and Practice positions Disability Memoir as a distinct category grounded in radical self-narration and resistance to popular constructions of the ideal body/mind. I argue that Disability Memoir destabilizes the concept of normativity and, as a literary genre, often disrupts popular constructions of narrative linearity. Although Disability Memoir is not a new category, my research moves away from distinct classification tools (“autism memoir,” “cancer memoir,” etc.) and the focus on white physically disabled activists, towards life writing that captures intersectional and multifaceted disability experiences. I approach this interdisciplinary project from the standpoint of a memoirist, rhetorician, educator, and Disability Studies scholar, interrogating not only what I teach and why I teach it, but also how I teach it. Utilizing pedagogy as methodology, I explore the dual entry points of content and process, indicating how specific texts demonstrate effective writing practices while reinforcing creative construction as political action. At the center of this work is what it means to describe experiences often understood as “unspeakable,” or resistant to language. Through this interrogation, I identify disability memoirs as texts that combat practices of erasure and instead leave evidence.

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2020, English

Bodies of Knowledge promotes the investigation of dance literature, or texts that emphasize dance choreography, cultural origins of dance forms, and the development of a kinesthetic sense of self. In particular, I look at how Latina writers embrace dance as a way of negotiating and expanding experiences of cultural difference. To do so I use the term "embodied knowledge" - developed from dance studies scholars like Didre Sklar and Susan Leigh Foster (among others) - to identify the way bodily practices inform social identities. I expand upon this term by arguing that it is part of a process of becoming wherein a dancer's somatic awareness also informs her gender, sexuality, and cultural belonging. I align this term with Latina writers like Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, who argue that the racialized body is a site of transformation through the imagination. Through the literary representations of dancing Latina bodies, I contend language is a vital component of the embodied knowledge of dance because it activates what Joseph Roach calls the kinesthetic imagination. I argue the narratives in this dissertation initiate embodied knowledge through the kinesthetic imagination which results in complex representations of Latinas. I focus on dance literature written in the transition between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. During this period, Latina authors presented narratives where protagonists began to make choices independent of either Latin American or United States cultures. The first-person narratives in this dissertation emphasize the crucial role the body plays in both learning how to dance and learning how to navigate cultural contexts as Latinas, in all various iterations, because of this attention to embodiment. The texts - Esmeralda Santiago's memoirs, When I Was Puerto Rican (1993), Almost a Woman (1998), and The Turkish Lover (2004), Alma Guillermoprieto's memoir, Dancing with Cuba (2004), Ana Castillo's novel Peel My Love Like an Onion (1999 (open full item for complete abstract)

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.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Comparative Studies

As the number of forcibly displaced people increases globally, border crossing into Global North countries is often discussed as a crisis or emergency. Europe's recent "refugee crisis" illustrates the range of circumstances to which these discourses refer: humanitarian issues requiring urgent response; institutional crises, given the insufficiency of extant systems and structures to accommodate arriving migrants; or dangers for local and national communities who perceive the arrival of outsiders as a threat to their security and cultural identity. In Witnessing Emergency: Testimonial Narratives of Precarious Migration to Italy, I argue that in Italy, a key port of entry for migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea to Europe, the "emergency imaginary" that has shaped public and political responses to migrant arrivals perpetuates the idea that Africa-Europe migration via the Mediterranean Sea is sudden, unforeseen, and detached from historical mobilities. In fact, the recent crisis bears echoes of longer histories of transit, in particular between former African colonies and former European colonizing powers. To map the stakes and contours of "emergency," and to understand its limits and omissions, this dissertation examines how media and political framings of irregular Mediterranean migration as a crisis or emergency enable the racialization of migrants and obscure the colonial relations that continue to shape notions of identity and otherness in Italy and across Europe. I interrogate these framings through testimonial transactions that contextualize and challenge emergency discourses. The testimonies I put in conversation include published life writing (memoir and documentary film) that centers migrant experiences; oral history interviews I conducted with migrants, staff, and volunteers at multiple reception sites in Italy in 2017, 2018, and 2019; and a set of encounters in urban spaces and art installations. The transactions reflected in or mobilized through thes (open full item for complete abstract)