The dissertation consists of a critical analysis as well as the novel Tigers Born in the Same Year. The critical analysis interrogates the relationship between Asian American subject position in the United States, the history of Asian American literatures, and the conflict between inherited binary narratives and nuanced, specific story-telling. In order to move beyond such narratives as struggling with the label "model minority," wrestling between "Asian" and "American," and being "Asian enough," it is necessary to synthesize these literary and sociocultural inheritances with nuanced, specific lenses. From synthesis may arise a new space, one where rather than alienation and measuring up, there can be a sense of home. Tigers Born in the Same Year seeks language for social reckoning through personal discovery, representing a challenge to established narratives while recognizing the need to explore how they were built, the impacts they have, and what exists in the spaces beyond them. In Tigers Born in the Same Year, when 13-year Minyoung Walsh witnesses the molestation of her sister by their older brother, she must make one of three choices: stay silent, fight back, or shout. Based on these three possibilities, three lives are braided together in the novel. All three …

Collection of poems.

Still House is a poetry manuscript that explores the relationship between traditional gender roles and traditional poetic forms. The poems in this collections seek to revise the role of the homemaker and interrogate whether it is okay to take comfort and pleasure in tasks that are often labeled as feminine (i.e. cooking, baking, decorating, organizing, shopping, choosing outfits) while rejecting other parts of the homemaker archetype, such as subservience to and dependence upon men. Limited gender roles, patriarchy, sexist comments, capitalism, toxic masculinity, the cis-hetero-white-male gaze, trauma, physical pain, illness—these all can make it feel like we are not fully in control and ownership of our bodies, like something is encroaching. The poems in Still House are invested in using the poetics of embodiment (a poetics centered around telling stories about the body through immersive sensory details) to reclaim the body from trauma, patriarchy, and chronic pain and illness.

Contained within is a sample, consisting of the first twelve chapters, which portray the final days of the fictional Polian War. The events are a springboard for the rest of the novel, and indeed the series.

The Sandbox and Other Short Stories is a part of an anthology reflecting on conflicting military cultures, tribal identities, and transition struggles within an enduring war and postmodernism society.

Oklahoma History is a collection of poetry that examines the speaker's relationship to and critique of her home state, Oklahoma. The poems navigate race and gender as they intersect with local histories, culture, and religion, which complicates and often contradicts what the speaker is taught through childhood, adolescence, and into adulthood. The creative portion is accompanied by a critical preface which looks at how the poems and other writings of Oklahoma poet Joy Harjo impact the author's writing.

An essay and short story collection about rebirth and being trans and neurodivergent. The essays and stories cover the entire length of my MA, but are mostly written before I came out as trans and edited after. The arc follows this discovery as well as the discovery of my writing following more experimental means including the twisting and playing with the braided essay, the introduction of essaying moves to fiction forms, and moving from what I thought was about death to what I realized I was writing all along about rebirth.

Rein of Renegades is an introduction to the young adult contemporary fantasy novel of the same name. It is prefaced with an explication of various drafts written throughout adolescence. I am trying to reclaim things I've misplaced or dropped. Over the past few years, I've had much too many trinkets to carry. There went the melodramatic allegations from my teenage writing voice, cracked on a classroom floor. There went the ability to sit, stomach deep, so steadily grounded in another world, this escape blurred with the strawberry ice cream I dripped onto the campus concrete. Writing the ideal love becomes complicated, jaded, too realistic when the hands writing it are always reaching for someone who never reaches back at the right time

This dissertation examines representations of the Pacific theater in World War II in ethnic American literature, with a focus on its rendition of US and Japanese racism and imperialism in the mid-twentieth century. Reading a range of African, Asian, Jewish, Mexican, and Native American literary writings, I investigate their modifications of the American master narrative that the Second World War was "good" and "necessary," a war fought against fascism and for democracy, justice, and freedom. Instead of such a simplistic and reductive view, ethnic American writers envision the Pacific theater as a race war between whites and persons of color and as a conflict between two imperialist nations, the United States and Japan. Ethnic Americans' racial double consciousness functions to resist an oversimplification of the Pacific theater. In these ethnic writers' work, American characters from diverse backgrounds create friendships with those of Asian nationalities, including Chinese, Filipinos, Koreans, and Japanese. These texts are necessary because ethnic Americans' experiences are underrepresented in the traditional WWII narrative of Western masculinity, originated by Ernest Hemingway and completed by President Truman and Douglas MacArthur. As opposed to the typical white American literary and cinematic treatment of the war as fought in the land of …

Louisiana Saturday Nights is a collection of poetry and accompanying critical introduction written for the doctorate in Literature and Creative Writing.

Somehow Holier ruminates playfully on the problem of suffering and our responses to it. These poems take as their subjects theology, history, art, my wife's struggle with chronic migraines, and gardening. "Res Gestae Variorum," a crown of sonnets at the center of the book, recounts the lives of would-be Christian saints, like the third-century theologian Origen, whose penchant for suffering obstructed them on the path to holiness. In "Mater Misericordiae" I flip through a calendar filled with famous depictions of Mary while my wife consults with a doctor. These poems blend humor and pathos, striving at once to laugh in the face of pain and account for its awful cost. Throughout, I'm in conversation with the poets who've influenced my voice as a writer: Charles Wright, Phillip Larkin, and Seamus Heaney.

A collection of poems and critical introduction.

This dissertation begins with a critical preface that examines the haunted present and its impact on writing for third and fourth generation Holocaust survivors. Then follows a collection of poetry and prose that examine themes of intergenerational trauma, experiences of the Shoah, grief, and chronic illness.

A collection of short stories exploring patterns that play out in people's lives and relationships.

A collection of poetry.

"With the Earth in Mind" responds to some of the most cutting-edge research in the field of ecocriticism, which centers on ecological loss and the grief that ensues. Ecocritics argue that ecological objects of loss abound--for instance, species are disappearing and landscapes are becoming increasingly compromised--and yet, such loss is often deemed "ungrievable." While humans regularly grieve human losses, we understand very little about how to genuinely grieve the loss of nonhuman being, natural environments, and ecological processes. My dissertation calls attention to our society's tendency to participate in superficial nature-nostalgia, rather than active and engaged environmental mourning, and ultimately activism. Herein, I investigate how an array of postwar and contemporary American novels represent a complex relationship between environmental degradation and mental illness. Literature, I suggest, is crucial to investigations of this problem because it can reveal the human consequences of ecological loss in a way that is unavailable to political, philosophical, scientific, and even psychological discourse.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the multiple versions of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" in concert and determine the reason for their continued presence in the American cultural landscape. To do so I will look at the novel and four films and examine the context in which they were created. In reexamining the novel and films, a central theme begins to emerge: interiority. Fear in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" moves from an external to an internal threat. The bodily locus of the monstrous other has been re-purposed and re-projected outward. The internal nature of the monstrous threat is displayed in the narrative’s use of production and distribution, mental health professionals, pseudo-families, and the vilification of sleep. Finally, this paper will examine the studio influence on the various films and their impact on the relative endings.

A Hint of Meaning contains a scholarly preface, "Language, Experimentation, and Craft: Creating a Vivid, Continuous Fictional Dream," that discusses the ambiguities of language and how they relate to different aspects of the craft of writing. Six original short stories follow the preface. "Musical Chairs" explores a woman's conflicting emotions about her ex-husband. "Baby Steps" depicts the struggle of a woman against her father's alcoholism. "Go Home Happy" depicts a day in the life of a video store employee. "Bargain Basement Perfection" contrasts the reality of a relationship with an imagined, perfect relationship. "Did You Hear about Donald and Bitsy?" is an experimental piece that tells a story through gossip. "Glass Angels" explores a minister's relationship with his homosexual son and how that relates to the minister's faith.

This paradoxically titled collection of poems explores what the blues and blindness has come to mean to the author.

This thesis considers how Samson Occom and Joseph Johnson, Mohegan writers in Early America, used the hymns of English hymnodist, Isaac Watts. Each chapter traces how either Samson Occom or Joseph Johnson's adapted Isaac Watts's hymns for Native communities and how these texts are sites of affective sovereignty.

The Ends of Smaller Worlds is a collection of short stories set in Indiana. The preface is about the representation of the information age using elements of dirty realism and Gothic fiction.

This work contains a series of essays examining childhood trauma through the lens and experience of the author.

Some Names for Empty Space is a collection of poems that considers how poetry and language operate to define human experience, reconciling the 'empty spaces' between the self and the abstracted variables of all things. The poems here often find their impetus in fatherhood and a parent's efforts to explain the world to a child.