While investigating incidents where imperfection improves the whole instead of ruining it—across disciplines including animation, particle physics, and rug making—the narrator of “Botched” remembers an early childhood trauma, and explores how this flaw might have shaped her own life. “Botched” is a literary exploration into the heart of imperfection, blending fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and photography.

What We Hide is a collection of memoir essays that explores the themes of mystery and deception in personal relationships, specifically within familial and romantic ones. Though the essays in the collection explore the decades from early in the narrator's childhood through her move to Florida for graduate school, the narrator's keen discernment of the world around her and her curiosity for what experiences shape a person's character remain constant. Many essays explore the extent of her father's alcoholism and the consequences of it, as well as the narrator's obsession over the possible sources of his addictions. Other essays examine the narrator's relationships with men beginning when she enters high school and question the extent to which her strained relationship with her father both excuses and/or explains the way she deceives and allows herself to be deceived in these relationships. What We Hide is endlessly implicating and looks for the accountability of these situations from all sources. The narrator delves into the sneakiness of her parents' courtship, the accusations that become commonplace during their divorce, the ways in which the narrator lies to family, friends, and boyfriends for her own selfish motives, and how each of these experiences shapes subsequent ones. What We Hide uses personal experience, emails, and newspaper articles to demonstrate the vulnerability, contradictions, and complications that are inherent in all of us as humans and how these weaknesses manifest themselves in the relationships with those we are closest with.

My dissertation is a memoir based on my childhood experiences growing up with a mentally ill mother. She exhibited violence both passive and aggressive, and the memoir explores my relationship with her and my relationship with the world through her. "Damned Good Daughter" developed with my interest in creative nonfiction as a genre. I came to it after studying poetry, discovering that creative nonfiction offers a form that accommodates both the lyric impulse in poetry and the shaping impulse of story in fiction. In addition, the genre makes a place for the first person I in relation to the order and meaning of a life story. Using reverse chronology, my story begins with the present and regresses toward childhood, revealing the way life experiences with a mentally ill parent build on one another.

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.

This collection of nonfiction essays explores one woman’s journey of reentering the world of dating after getting divorced in her forties. Neither an exposé of online dating practices nor a dating how-to manual, these essays strive instead to examine the amusing, poignant, and often tragic ways in which we humans are aligned in our frailty, our brokenness, and ultimately in our redemptive search for love and higher meaning in life. They are also a reminder that there is much that is intrinsically valuable about this search, even when it is not ultimately successful.

This memoir is about community, family and race relations as the author experiences them in New Jersey, where she grew up, at University of Maryland, where she went to college, in Washington, D.C., during Barack Obama’s presidency, and in New Orleans, where she lands in her late twenties. It is meant to shed light on the possibilities and beauty to be found in diverse, close-knit communities, where people share in each other’s joys and sorrows. It also speaks to the importance of romantic partnerships in which both people share the same values, and explore and grow together.

Latinos are the largest minority group in the U.S.; however despite the continuous growth of the Hispanic population, Latinos are severely underrepresented in STEM fields. One of the reasons that might explain why Latinos do not major in STEM is the way they encounter science curriculum in primary school. Students' limited proficiency in English may constrain their science achievement when instruction is delivered exclusively in English. A quantitative analysis with graduation rates in STEM from 2009 to 2014 at the University of North Texas was conducted, finding that there is a significant difference (p<0.05) in the number of bachelor's degrees in STEM between Hispanic, White, African American and other student populations. Interviews with teachers, librarians and publishing companies were performed to describe the limited science literature in Spanish at the Dallas ISD schools. Improving science literacy by teaching according to ELLs' linguistic skills and culture may lead to a better understanding of science curriculum throughout their education, which may translate into higher college graduation rates by Hispanic recipients in STEM.

IT’S ALWAYS SOMEBODY’S PARIS: AN EXAMINATION OF PLACE IN NONFICTION WRITING By Jessica E. Sculthorpe This thesis examines the importance of place in nonfiction writing, using both the author’s personal experience as a student in Paris and the writings of other Americans in Paris, including members of the Lost Generation. The first two chapters examine the author’s experience as a young student in Paris. The third and fourth chapters contain the author’s reflection on the process of writing the thesis and an examination of the ways in which other writers have written about Paris in their own nonfiction writing.

Auto Biography is a creative nonfiction memoir: A daughter, forced to move her unlovable, ever-combustible, wheelchairbound mother cross-country in an RV, attempts to come to terms with her via the automobiles of their lives. The story explores: 1) the universal dilemma of caring for aged parents––its stress, its pain, its sacrifice, and its dark humor; 2) memory––the "peeling back" narrative style working in the same layer upon layer way of memory, its non-linearity creating not so much a one-piece narrative but essay snapshots forming a family photo album view of this thing we call memory and this thing we call meaning; and, of course, 3) cars––their subtle yet surprisingly essential role in all our modern and post-modern lives.

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