IMPOSSIBLE PARADISE, a collection of five nonfiction stories, profiles the most skilled and Inventive South Florida con artists of the last ten years. These swindlers have both fascinated and repulsed Miamians with their criminal behavior. A murder landed Danny Faries in the Dade County Jail, where he performed one of the largest credit card scams in U.S. history. Tommy Williams scammed limousine rides, luxury hotel stays, even escaped from jail, impersonating judges and celebrities. Richard Hayward was “The Romeo Bandit.” Henry Gherman convinced prominent Miami Beach surgeons that he was a financial genius. He spent their earnings, then fled the country. Daniel Lugo emerged from federal prison with a Medicare fraud idea. The scheme unfolded disastrously, resulting in two killings. In writing these true tales of trust and betrayal, I employed the theories and techniques recommended in The New Journalism by Tom Wolfe.

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.

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Studies of Pain in a Multitude of Forms is a collection of creative non-fiction work based around the different types of pain that an individual can experience while attempting to navigate their childhood, their relationship with their partner, and their relationship with their own body. Several longer-form essays are broken up by brief interlude flash pieces titled according to the colors that dominate their scenes. These small bits and pieces from the author's experience help to guide the flow of the larger works, working to lead the reader along the evolution of the writings. Borrowing from different formats for their work, from a piece styled as a research paper to a letter written to someone who will never receive it, the author attempts to help make one of life's most impossible tasks- the understanding of another person's experience and pain- possible.

We Are the Asteroid is a collection of personal essays concerned with the power of erasure and manipulation of chronology that comes with writing. It both acknowledges and participates in the fact that nonfiction writers become unstuck in time, whether they want to or not, traveling between ages, rearranging the order of events into the stories they tell. The collection centers on a few traumatic events in the narrator's life, and it explores the ways in which she deals with those events through her writing. The writer utilizes various structural techniques, such as the segmented form, to play with the idea that the placement of events in a story can affect the emotions attached to those memories. In this way, the writer looks at the power that writing has over illness, violent relationships, and even death. Exploring topics as wide-ranging as infertility, inauthentic grief, and sacrifice, the collection resolutely returns to the idea that the nonfiction writer is in control of, and therefore charged with, the responsibility of making beautiful even the saddest of memories. We Are the Asteroid serves both as a wish to go back and an acknowledgement that we must, despite our abilities and tools as a writer to dwell, continue moving forward.

"Taking Inventory" is a biography about my mother, whose life spanned decades filled with hope, heartbreak, loneliness, and adversity. Weaving together micro-essay and prose poetry set at the merger of her adulthood and my childhood, this mixed genre collection examines the many ways her life influenced mine. The triptych structure of the book moves backwards in time, exploring the relationship between my mother and the world she navigated, beginning with the final stages of her life, moving through a turbulent mid-life, and ending with the young woman affected by a world war, an alcoholic father, and a devoutly religious mother. In the essay "Late Night Ap·o·lo·gi·a," regret and justification are intertwined to explore an imagined confessional, while another key piece, "A Daughter's Nondisclosure Agreement," allows my teenage persona to put my mother's indiscretions on full display. "When I Kissed Her Today, She Smelled Like Coconut" and "I Was Someone's Daughter Once" highlight the redemptive qualities that created the foundation of the mother-daughter alliance that is evident in "Ice Cream." "Bumper-to-Bumper Bravado" and "whiteboard reality" relate the struggles of navigating the final stages of her life. At some point, you realize your mother is not who you thought she was, but someone separate from what you made her out to be. My mother didn't have the solutions, nor the answers to her problems—or her daughter's. In many ways, "Taking Inventory" stands in judgement regarding the why, how, and what if in her role both as a mother and as a woman. It's full of questions about motherhood, womanhood, and daughterhood—and ultimately about forgiveness.

The concept of home is often synonymous with security. Dutiful Daughter is a memoir which traces the experience and impact of growing up with an alcoholic mother and an abusive father. Mothering plays a large part in these pieces: my complicated love for my alcoholic mother, the ways in which our roles sometimes reversed, my search for an alternative mother figure growing up, and my attempts to mother myself. I also explore the shifting concept of home—from the home my parents created to the many homes I found after they divorced. As an adult, I searched and found my brother Christopher, whom I had not seen in thirty years, and discovered he was homeless, schizophrenic and an alcoholic. This memoir details my search and the complex struggle to get him into a stable situation. Throughout, I attempt to address the dissonance between the dream of a home and the reality.

What is a real life? A well-lived life? And how do we define either? Baby Bird & the Electronic Abyss is a collection of personal essays that questions and explores escapism and existentialism as experienced at music festivals and campsites around the United States. Within this collection, festivals are illustrated as more than just spectacular stages and bright lights—they're depicted as fascinating, budding utopias that encourage creativity, generosity, and positivity from attendees who abandon inhibitions, and oftentimes logic, in the name of fleeting freedom from the routine of their "real" lives. The narrator strives to live a fulfilled life—what many might call a well-lived life, if not a privileged life—but she struggles to identify her life as meaningful as she works to disentangle the falsities of her "real" life as typically defined by society, a corporate, desk life in between festivals, and her electric life, an actualized but less publicly-accepted life at festivals. She repeatedly contemplates her relationship with art, and whether or not art offers a sort of immortality to those who pursue it. As a festival-goer, she finds that the art of music takes her away from her own art, writing, but her writing is about the festivals, so a love/hate relationship grows with the festivals over time. Many of these essays, such as "In a Tent, a Home," "Rebecca," "We Left Town," and "I Don't Wanna Wear No Shoes," ruminate on how dislocation and travel can be fulfilling occasions for further ontological inquiry. Other essays, including "They Call Me Baby Bird," "Monterey, Babe," and "When the Fire Dancers Come Alive at Night," focus on music and entertainment, and a kind of resulting debauchery that compels the narrator to reflect on her moral incontinence, inability to identify reality, and jaded self-appraisal.

Go Ahead, Daytona is a collection of essays meant to explore the experiences and lessons learned through law enforcement. It juxtaposes hope with cynicism and encourages the reader to explore his or her own biases through the lens of a narrator believing police work is something to be lived down, rather than up. The essays depict struggles with hypocrisy, sex, homelessness, violence, moral ambiguity, and self-awareness.

Hunting Down Pigs is a hybrid collection of personal essays, ranging from lyrical to braided, which more often than not defy labeling. The essays explore themes of loss, faith, and self-reliance. Growing up Mormon, with all its strictures, and losing her dad at a young age, made faith an issue that the narrator grappled with continuously throughout her life. The narrator questions the validity and purpose of religion in essays like "Possibilities" and "Going to Church." Specifically, the narrator explores the doctrine of the Mormon church and the effects of such a strict upbringing. When divine intervention fails, the narrator must learn to transfer her faith in God to a personal faith in herself. In essence, this is a coming of age story for the late bloomer, for the forty-something woman who has realized or needs to realize that you can't rely on God or a man to save you— you have to save yourself, and in doing so you will receive the gift of faith in yourself.