This dissertation is composed of a critical preface, "Reconciling Art and Account in the Creative Essay," and the essay collection Resurrection Attempts: Essays. The preface situates the following essay collection within the genre of contemporary creative nonfiction. Specifically, it argues that genre-bending or genre hybridity are inherent and unavoidable features of creative nonfiction writing and should be celebrated, rather than denied or lamented. It points to other writers who deliberately challenge the bounds of genre, and discusses some of the collection's innovations in form and other ways it offers experimentation, such as use of unusual or borrowed points of view, disruption of chronology, and adoption of elements from other genres of writing, including fiction, poetry, and academic. Ultimately, embracing the artistic side of creative nonfiction (as opposed to its "purely" journalistic side) allows for heightened intimacy with the reader, a much wider breadth of storytelling, and a more vulnerable—and therefore more truthful—interrogation of legacy and the human experience. Resurrection Attempts is a collection of essays exploring the writer's rural Texas childhood and the early and tragic losses of her parents, including the effect of those experiences on her adult life and performance of motherhood. The voices of the writer's sisters …

"Improvisation without Accompaniment" is a lyric investigation into the ways that an awareness of mutability and death can clarify or distort our experience of the world. The poems in this collection draw upon the speaker's small-town Texas upbringing to explore broader questions that arise as a consequence of his burgeoning awareness of mortality: What are the moral imperatives for an individual citizen in a larger political community? What are the bidirectional effects of our relationship with place and the environment? Given the painful transience of human experience, what does it mean to live a good life? The book is characterized by psychological poems that illustrate the mind's movement, poems that use syntactic variation and tonal shifts to indicate an openness to changes of heart and mind. "What Passes Here for Mountains," an in-progress poetry manuscript, is driven by a similar impulse to explore the precise ways that our beliefs and opinions affect our immediate experience. These newer poems address anxieties about climate change, the effects of childhood trauma on the adults those children become, and the obstacles to self-actualization.

A collection of short fiction stories that fixate on the role of the strange and the imagined.

Trauma novel refers to a work of fiction that discloses serious loss or intense fear on individuals and groups. The traumatic experience is repetitious, timeless, and unspeakable. Gayl Jones, Jesmyn Ward, Tayari Jones, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison are only a few authors who have written this type of novel. The traumatic events that occur in the books are rape, miscarriage of justice, and slavery, to name a few. The experienced trauma manifest as fragmented memory, silence, commitment phobia, intimate distance, and feelings of abandonment. In her book, Quiet As It's Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison, J. Brooks Bouson argues that the traumatic experience of slavery and "white racist practices" throughout history produced a "collective African-American experience" which appears in fiction and in the fabric of American culture (4) as intergenerational trauma. African American authors are reimaging history told primarily in first and third person limited, and even if the novel has an omniscient point of view, it can change to third person limited. They use point of view to adeptly navigate the effects of trauma on the psyche interweaving closeness and distance to manipulate the emotional, intellectual, and moral responses the author desires. …

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.