A study through short stories of the emotional effects on close family relationships before and after a traumatic death.

Running From My Youth: Essays is a collection of nonfiction essays that explore important moments and experiences from the narrator's youth, and how he has addressed and remembered them in the years since. Some of the essays explore the narrator's time as a distance-runner, while others explore the awkwardness and discomfort onset by religion and nudity.

Collection of poems.

An interrogation of male behavior in isolated masculine spaces through short stories, an essay, and chapters from a novel-in-progress.

Life Holders is a collection of personal essays reflecting on my interactions with others concerning my military service.

Failure to Yield is a collection of creative nonfiction that explores themes of presence and emotional connection and expression. The seven essays, which include three flash essays, explore the themes by reflecting on such topics as marriage, parent-child relationships and addiction. The collection is woven together by the author's relationships with her parents and children and by her experiences growing up in a small town in Iowa.

A mosaic of past and present, mother and daughter, body and spirit: A Kind of Ghost inhabits memory and imagined spaces, haunting and begging to be remembered.

A chapbook-length collection of poems.

This is a collection of two stories, one fiction and one non-fiction, in communication with one another. Both stories explore how trauma can transform a life. In "Tabula Rasa," Mena is unable to recall her past after being beaten and left for dead. She must choose whether to uncover her past or forget it and move forward with her life. Set in a town run by witches, Mena learns that both choices are dangerous. In "Eternal Second," the narrator recounts the aftermath of her husband's suicide. She explores how trauma invades all aspects of her life. In both stories, women must navigate a new life created by the destruction of the old one.

This thesis consists of a collection of poems. By virtue of its content and arrangement, the collection ruminates on and attempts to work through the problem of corporeality and bodily experience: the anxieties surrounding illness, mortality, and the physicality of contemporary life. This collection explores the tension inherent in the mind/body duality and, rather than prescribing solutions, offers multiple avenues and perspectives through which to view bodily experience, as well as how that experience affects an individual’s identity, agency, and sense of self.

Equilibrium is paramount in the crafting of a story, and for every writer this sense of balance is different. The writer must manage a balance of showing and telling, of denotation and connotation, and forever strive to find the perfect word in both the denotative and connotative sense, so that the reader and writer can meeting in a living story—both in the ink on the page and the remaining white space.

This collection consists of a critical preface and five short stories. The preface considers the use of the fantastical in fiction and how it works as a tool to reach readers in comparison with realistic fiction. The stories investigate this in by following several strange characters put in everyday human situations.

This collection of creative non-fiction essays is written from the perspective of a Protestant Christian church leader’s daughter emerging into adulthood and independence. She labors to define her relationship with God, family, and friends and to determine the complicated, but pervasive role of faith in her life while coping with depression and anxiety; a brain aneurysm and malformation among other health problems; working in an all-male environment in the Houston Chronicle Sports department; the death of her grandparents; the death of a Muslim friend in a murder-suicide shooting; and her troubled relationship with an agnostic friend. Although she expresses her doubts in each scenario, she identifies purpose in the trials and accepts the challenges that accompany being the child of the priest.

The following collection includes three short stories and two essays compiled with a critical preface. “Valentine’s Day” explores the limits of friendship and love in various situations including, two road trips (one fictional and one factual), pet ownership, and the impersonations of Frank Sinatra.