Emerson thesis -- Creative writing

"More Harm Than That' is an exploration of the lives of women. Women who have made desperate choices and unraveling mistakes. Women who are not perfect, but wiser through their own experiences. Women who beat their fists upon their breasts to show up just a little bit louder in their lives, to leave their mark. But at what cost? Because to be a woman in this world is a beautifully ensnaring trick. May we continue our work until we all break free." -- Abstract

"These pages are the start to a novel that I have been working on for over a year now. The characters in this story deal with the many varying hardships that come from being human. Through the eyes of our narrator, we see a journey of trauma and healing. This novel will unravel the deeply interwoven the threads of humanity as it attempts to see what happens when you mix love and codependecy." -- Abstract

"Mother May I depicts the cat-and-mouse game between a young woman who believed she was sick for the first eighteen years of her life and the mother who caused her illness. The mother's timeline takes place in the present while the daughter's timeline begins five years earlier. This second timeline slowly fills in the missing pieces of the present-day puzzle. By the end of the story, the two narratives converge. Mother May I is a finished novel of 85,000 words." -- Abstract

This collection of short stories examines "the subtle aspects of fate and its consequences by writing about Middle Eastern characters, who are scattered across the map of these stories but indirectly joined." --Abstract.

"This memoir-in-essays, which unfolds more thematically than chronologically, explores themes of trauma, addiction, race, class, empathy, and the destruction that results from ignoring those very issues." --Abstract.

"The Museum of Memory is a series of essays exploring the author's experiences as the child of an ethnographic researcher. The first essays discuss trips to Liberia, Dahomey, and Brazil. The second half of the essays concern the author's attempt to make sense of the travel memories and give them context in terms of family history, art history, and recovery from trauma." --Abstract.

'My Not-So-Brilliant Career' chronicles the path of one woman's career and life choices from the childhood influences of her family through a series of dissatisfying and painful job experiences to the decision to give up a lucrative career path to follow

"This collection of nonfiction essays engages narrative forms and structures of interpretation as methods of enacting control and ownership over intangible ideas." --Abstract.

These plot-driven lyric poems concerning love, death, and family are separated into three different sections corresponding with (I) childhood and adolescence, (II) young adulthood, and (III) relative maturity. -- abstract.

"Nine Lives is an essay collection comprised of stories of love, heartbreak, abuse, and addiction. Each piece details a moment in my life that continued to impact me long after the plane took off, the wounds healed, or the bodies were buried. In writing this collection, I strove for uncomfortable vulnerability—to place emotions on the page not often expressed, in hopes of inspiring my audience to do the same." -- Abstract

No Arrangements chases after several people as they conduct themselves around a perpetually unfinished shopping center in a busy market district. Suppliers, merchants, builders, financiers, politicians and socialites all are affected in unsettling ways by

"No Future is a collection of linked short stories set in a near future in Bakersfield, California, chronicling the lives of Raphael "Raffi" Veras and Louis Palko. Each story is voice-driven and unified by the idea that spectacular ambitions and technological advancements are always marred by an escape from messier, more fundamental human conflicts." -- Abstract