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

MFA, Kent State University, 2020, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

The movement of humans across the globe in the shadow of conquest has, for thousands of years, been synonymous with the movement of horses – their bones lie alongside ours in the chronicle of civilization. The Bones of the Horse is a collection of braided essays exploring Man's evolutionary relationship with horses, set alongside a personal narrative exploring the author's own development as a horseperson. The essays braid elements of memoir with research regarding the horse's place as the most universally conscripted, living companion and tool in human history: the use of the horse as a soldier and therapy aid, the horse-dominant culture of nomadic Mongolians, horse welfare and rehabilitation, and the horse's consistent representation in artwork from nearly every millennia and every corner of the world.

Committee: David Giffels (Advisor) Subjects: Animals; Cultural Anthropology; Fine Arts; History; Modern History; Recreation; World History

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2019, English (Arts and Sciences)

This thesis is a collection of essays, prose, and experimental works of creative nonfiction aimed at exploring how the psychological theory of ambiguous loss lends itself to creative nonfiction as an anchor, and as a tool for analogous investigation. The thesis includes a critical introduction that defines this theory at length, observing its occurrence in the sphere of nonfiction writing. The critical introduction places this author in conversation with writers also working with themes conversant with ambiguous loss like Sarah Manguso, Maggie Nelson, and Emily Rapp. As this thesis is a collection of various forms of factual narratives including personal essays, memoir, and digital compositions, the critical introduction also depicts the author's craft techniques and intentional design choices when working with nonfiction storytelling.

Committee: Dinty W Moore (Committee Chair); Eric LeMay (Committee Co-Chair); Edmond Chang (Committee Member) Subjects: Behavioral Psychology; Composition; Design; Environmental Studies; Fine Arts; Personal Relationships; Personality; Psychology

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2018, English

Running with DuBois is a collection of creative nonfiction essays through which the author explores the nature of her whiteness and its roots in white supremacist thought within the context of the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States.

Committee: Elissa Washuta (Advisor); Lee Martin (Committee Member) Subjects: Womens Studies

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

An essay collection exploring concerns of the sandwich generation: aging and dying parents, college age children, marriage, and divorce.

Committee: David Giffels Mr. (Committee Chair); Mary Biddinger Dr. (Committee Member); Chris Barzak Mr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, Cleveland State University, 2017, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

Independent Provider is a creative examination of sex work and sex workers in the city of Cleveland, as well as its surrounding suburbs. This examination is, in essence, a creative nonfiction collage which melds historical reportage, oral history, and personal essay together to create a larger picture about how female sexuality is criminalized and policed. It includes historical reportage of Cleveland's legal and social relationship with sex work, as well as the way sex work has evolved as an occupation within the city. In addition to the historical legacy, there are oral histories from current sex workers who advertise in Cleveland, and personal essays about the author's own experiences. The second half of this thesis is a collection of personal essays which revolve around sexual assault, family dynamics, mental illness, and how these can either strengthen or dissolve relationships. These personal essays also contribute to the larger theme of Independent Provider in that they comment on how female sexuality is still seen as secondary and is still highly regulated either by family, friends, religious leaders, and society in general.

Committee: David Giffels M.A. (Committee Chair); Caryl Pagel M.F.A. (Committee Member); Michael Geither M.F.A. (Committee Member); Brad Ricca Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; American Literature

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2017, English

This thesis is a collection of personal essays that explore the narrator's experience with belief, faith, personal loss, and motherhood. The collection seeks to examine the ramifications of choice, the split and merge of past and present selves, and the implications of changing one's worldview. The essays employ different narrative modes in order to interrogate the nature of truth and the formation and deformation of self.

Committee: Lina Ferreira (Committee Chair); Michelle Herman (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts; Modern Literature

MFA, Kent State University, 2014, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

The themes and focuses of each essay in this collection are all largely coming-of-age stories, loss of innocence stories, and some fish out of water stories, though the sub-genre of the collective work is not memoir, but rather personal essay. When I use the term stories I mean only in the capacity that I draw from my personal experiences to illustrate a larger, more abstract idea that I then explore, similar to the structure of an academic essay—though with more creative license—just using largely my own experience in place of supportive and illustrative research. The overarching theme of the work itself is an examination of the relationship between fantasy and reality. Not only do I explore this relationship in the content of my essays, but in the writing style as well, as I frequently experiment with blending fiction into my nonfiction, thus paralleling the relationship. As with most creative works, this focus is exploratory. I do not make any promises, gambles, or explicit hypotheses about the end results, in part because the writing I do is highly subjective, but also because good creative writing is often more about the journey than the destination, and planning the end result ruins the process of writing it. With that said though, I hope to show, using my own experiences as example, that the transition from child to adult is a struggle, largely because of the disillusionment that comes with it, the suspension if not expulsion of childhood fantasies sacrificed for grown-up reality. And yet, fantasy still plays an integral part in adult life, it's just often relegated to fantasy, whereas as for a child, fantasy is the majority fabric that defines reality—Mom and Dad are superheroes, mythical entities like Santa and the Easter Bunny are accepted without question, play is driven by imagination that pours from the minds of children filling in the massive gaps in reality they don't understand or aren't even aware of yet similarly to how adult societies have his (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: David Giffels (Advisor); Chris Barzak (Committee Member); Craig Paulenich (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts; Journalism; Literature; Personal Relationships; Personality

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2010, English (Arts and Sciences)

This thesis is a collection of seven personal essays written by the author and headed by a critical introduction. The introduction presents an explication both of the title of the thesis and of the common theme uniting the various essays, that of the writer's attempt to understand and so empathize with the people about whom she writes, and also her desire to understand herself through writing. This thesis includes the following titles: "The Bat and Spider," "To Watch the Trees Grow," "Namesake," "Unbraided," "Five Ways of Looking at a Cave," "The Snow Cave," and "The Window."

Committee: Dinty W. Moore MFA (Advisor); Marsha Dutton PhD (Committee Member); Darrell Spencer PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: English literature

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2008, English (Arts and Sciences)

Kelley Evans's dissertation consists of a collection of personal essays, which foreground the experience of the body. In four sections – Sensation, Chaos/Control, Movement, Inward/Outward--she considers her body and the bodies of loved ones in states both elevated and debased, in social space and in the mind. In her critical introduction, “Canon(icle) for the Personal Essay,” Evans proposes a reflexive and constantly reinvented personal essay canon as a corrective for the hegemony of memoir in the field of creative nonfiction. Examining texts by Eliza Haywood, Margaret Fuller, Jamaica Kincaid, and Etel Adnan, Evans seeks to add diverse voices to the canon and to add innovative techniques to discussions of craft.

Committee: Joan C. Connor (Committee Chair); David Lazar (Committee Member); Dinty W. Moore (Committee Member); Jose Delgado-Costa (Committee Member); Janis Butler Holm (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Bachelor of Science of Journalism (BSJ), Ohio University, 2013, Journalism

Journalism has always been about questions. The fundamental building blocks of standard news stories are small questions with documentary orientations: Simple whos, whats, wheres, whens, hows, and whys that flesh out a story. It is easy to make a case for how basic facts help media consumers understand the world around them through simple documentation. But criticisms of modern journalism often take issue with the image of reality that journalism portrays. Scholars have conceptualized it as incomplete, biased, and unhelpful to society. Such questioning of media products and processes is fruitful. This project questions the media's reliance on objectivity as its means of documenting truth, and the primary question is whether or not compromising conventional journalistic objectivity in favor of a hybrid perspective that incorporates subjectivity could be a legitimate way for journalists to better represent truthful worldly reality. It analyzes how the elements of literary journalism can enable blending objective documentary impulses with self-conscious commentary to yield a media product that answers more questions. It asks if this hybridity can move journalism toward bigger questions approached on personal levels, thereby taking journalism from a passive reflection to an active representation. Ultimately, it is concerned with journalists' desire to have their work be a record of human activity and a promoter of democratic freedom and the issue of whether or not journalists have the ability or feel the obligation to comment on big questions and their answers. This project is not the first to question objectivity. It includes a literature review that explores some of the historical and philosophical discourse on the subject of objectivity and its use by journalists as a means to an end of truth. Journalism holds truth as its primary tenant. Objectivity is truth's twin ethic in journalistic discourse. After defining and critiquing a synthesized concept of objectivity (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Cary Frith (Advisor); Bernhard Debatin (Committee Chair) Subjects: Journalism