Introduction [excerpt] Within this project, both the poetry and the short stories will enlist professionally trained craft that will speak volumes toward the maturity of the three separate levels of writing: poetry, short fiction, and hybrid stories inflused with poetry. The author constantly revises and takes special care in creating work that covers relevant expressions while also portraying abstract images in innovative and unique contexts in order to force readers to open their minds. The largest...

Statement of Aesthetics [excerpts] I do not feel that I have led an extraordinary life, but rather that I have had the great fortune to have met extraordinary people. It is from these recollections that I have crafted this manuscript. All of the characters are amalgams. All of the emotions are mine. There is more than one voice, as I believe that we are all more than one person: who we are, who we were, and who we aspire to be. Each of these young people want to be more than they have been led to believe they were....

Project Statement [excerpt] In Cenchrus, the 24-year-old main character Moki Minori, and other minor characters experience nightmares, sleep paralysis, social anxiety, and a crippling generalized anxiety disorder that centers around the arrival of her strange new neighbor, Mr. Leon M. Grady. With the help of her friend and apartment mate, Ilya J. Ackermann, Moki must find out why she is connected to the stranger next door. In this piece, I aim to unsettle the readers with vivid...

Introduction [excerpt] The following manuscript is a piece of supernatural fiction set in the suburbs of New Jersey, with the exception of industrial areas, in the late 2010's. Deified is a character study of a first-person narrator with a retrospective view and nostalgic, curious voice. The narrator, named Forrest, is a Puerto Rican, teenage middle-schooler who analyzes the meaning behind the human voice and its potential, whether said potential is dormant due to familial...

Introduction [excerpt] The following manuscript is a work of fiction that has been in progress over the course of the past six months. It began when taking a Fiction Seminar course (EN 611) with Alex Gilvarry this past fall semester, 2021, as a rather straightforward workshop piece exploring grief, addiction, life and death.... The story is broken into ten chapters, each offering one or several vignettes or memories experienced by the characters. My main goal in doing this was to allow flexibility among...

Introductory Critical Essay [excerpt] The story that follows is a work of fiction called Killer Roadkill and is a political satire of the current global reaction surrounding Corona Virus 2019. The work uses critical theory, pulling from feminist theory and realism to depict a world many are familiar with, yet is outside of what can be fully understood when faced with something new. The main character, Brianna is on the road with her brother, Patrick, in hopes to reach Florida to find their mom...

Introduction [excerpt] Midnight is the first fifty pages of what is to be a novel over four times its current length. As the first quarter of the book, what was attempted in this thesis was to create a solid foundation for which the rest of the novel could be built atop without great concern about the novel's premise, voice, and direction. As a creative endeavor, it represents the culmination of six months of drafting and rewrites, as first envisioned in the short story ...

Overview [excerpts] The story of Monster City began back in 2011. I had originally begun it as a side project based on a simple gimmick, "What if monsters existed and lived together with humans?"... The titular Monster City was influenced both by New York City and Tokyo in terms of structure and landmarks.... Monster City started off geared towards a younger audience, but thanks to the Trump election I had a change of heart and decided to rework it to appeal to a slightly older crowd .......

Statement of Aesthetics [excerpt] One of the aims I have for this manuscript is to blur the line between "literary" and "genre" fiction — to take the themes and tropes commonly used in genre works and use them to comment on the human condition. In Terra Incognita — both the manuscript proper and the novel I hope to build off it — I hope to explore the negative effects nationalism, paranoia, and xenophobia have on society. While this manuscript only concerns itself with...

Introduction (excerpt) My manuscript work is a draft of the first four chapters (or "scenes") of a novel called Terror, Avant-garde. In these scenes, Thérèse Genevieve Alarie, a 65-year old former Off-Off Broadway actor, leaves her apartment for the first time in three years to attend a playwrighting workshop at a small community theatre in Passaic. Her intention is to reunite with the playwright Darrell Hawke (who she believes wrote a life-changing play for and about...