Taken In is a collection of poems about coming to terms with death, love, and the social responsibilities people owe to each other.

Home: A Memoir, a creative non-fiction thesis, is a memoir in the form of personal essays, each exploring some aspect of the meaning of home, how my sense of self has been formed by my relationship to home, and the inevitability of leaving home. Chapter I explores the nature of memory and of memoir, their relationship to each other and to truth, and how a writer's voice shapes memoir. Chapter II, “Paternity,” is an attempt to remember my father, resulting in renewed interest in his past and renewed awareness of his legacy. Chapter III, “Home,” is on the surface about my grandparents' house, but is really about my grandmother. Chapter IV, “Dixie,” is about my contradictory feelings for the South, and my eventual acceptance of the South's complexities.

This creative thesis is comprised of five original short stories and a critical preface. The preface discusses the changing cultural, sociopolitical, and socioeconomic landscape of the modern American South and the effects-positive, negative, and neutral-these changes have had on the region's contemporary literature, including the short stories contained within.

The following is a multi-genre collection, including short shorts, short fiction, non-fiction, and drama. Each piece utilizes Gothic motifs and dark comedy in an effort to explore life and loss.

The List is a collection of short stories focusing on the inability to adapt, or learn from self-destructive patterns, and the bizarre ways people reach out for one another when they don't know what else to do.

Forsythia is a collection of poetry that examines the transformative power of observation.

The four stories in this collection follow different, yet strikingly similar, protagonists who are facing crossroads in life. These stories include memories and specific scenes from the past that combine with scenes from the present to trace the development of the characters.

Some String or Another: Fiction and Nonfiction Stories of Connection, a creative thesis, explores patterns of change in stories from the perspective of connection and disconnection. The preface examines the effects of temporal disconnection, the relationship of conflict and connection to narrative rhythm, and the webs of connection formed during the process of creation. Included in the body of the work are six fiction stories, one metafiction story, and two nonfiction essays.

As a dyslexic child, I always had trouble finding my voice. It's hard to express yourself in words, when you struggle with them. For me words always come later when I write. But most people don't understand how I feel. If your synapses fire off at the right time how can you image what it would be like it they didn't? That's where fiction comes in. If you can override someone's lack of experience with the use of a metaphor, then by distancing the reader from reality with an allegory, you can get to truth that's hard to capture any other way. You can also simply tell the truth in your writing with plain nonfiction. For me, fiction and nonfiction are a way for me to claim my voice and convey truth. Only a reader can decided what that truth looks like.

Cities Beyond is a collection of poems about the liminal space between the suburbs and the pasture as metaphor for the created space of memory, self, and location.

Bad Poetry and Other Short Stories is a collection of social, political, and religious commentary. The last three stories are also commentary from a non-fiction perspective.

What is the boundary between fiction and nonfiction? What happens if the line between the two is crossed? Can we possibly recall events in our lives exactly as they happened? In creative nonfiction, such as memoir, the audience expects the writer to recall things exactly as they happened, with no embellishments, re-ordering, additions, or subtractions. It seems as if authors of creative nonfiction are bound to be questioned about events, nitpicked on details, challenged on memories, and accused of portraying real-life people the "wrong" way. Yet when the writer creates fiction, it seems to go the other way: readers like to think there are parallels between an author and her stories. Readers congratulate themselves for finding the similarities between the two, and instead of focusing on the crafted story at hand, try to search out which parts are "true" and which are embellished. Does any of this matter, though; don't all stories tell a kind of truth? We have an insatiable urge to classify, to "know" the truth, but truth isn't merely a recollection of cold facts; likewise, a story isn't any less true if it's fiction.

I believe that poetry has survived for thousands of years because it provides people with a transpersonal connection that they can't find elsewhere. I look for poetry that is more than an emotional expression, more than witty word play, and more than an interesting observation. I want poetry to give me that inspirational spark, that glimpse into a world beyond my own. Poems that succeed in doing this force me into a perspective that I haven't previously imagined by yoking together two or more seemingly disparate elements. This tension between the old elements and the new link between them creates energy for the poem. This poetic nexus contributes to the transpersonal experience that I seek.

Although I've read and written poetry for my own pleasure for about twenty years now, I've only seriously studied and written poetry on a consistent basis for the past two years. In this sense, I still consider myself a beginning poet. When attempting to pursue an art form as refined and historically informed as poetry, only after spending a number of years reading and writing intensively would I no longer consider myself a beginner, but a practitioner of the art. I've grounded my early development as a poet in concision, voice, and imagination, and hope to build upon these ideas with other poetic techniques, theories, and forms as I go forward. I am particularly interested in mastering the sonnet form, a concise and imaginative form that will allow me to further develop my skills. Hopefully, the works in this thesis reflect that effort.