Writing these poems over the last several years has been both challenge and solace. Many of them have been written under great constraints of time and energy, in flashes of insight (sometimes even at stop lights), and later revised. Taken together, they reflect preoccupation with the weight and heft of a thinking life in many different manifestations: internal, domestic, aesthetic, political. The writing of them has created for me quiet places for both close looking and expansive thinking, and into these places I hope my readers can walk, through the poems themselves.

I am from Dearborn, Michigan, home to one of the largest populations of Arab immigrants in the United States. This mixing of cultures, of peoples, of identities has informed my writing in many ways. Narrative themes of immigration, exile and isolation inspire my writing and my thesis represents chapters from my first novel, tracing the Arab American immigration experience from 1914 until 1967; and, my second novel, set in Detroit, continues this narrative through the perspectives of two characters, drawing on the post 9-11 Arab American community and experience. The poet Hayan Charara has spoken of “the absence of a ‘personal history’ of the Middle East. . . for those whose families were among the first waves of Arabs to immigrate to the United States.” As an Arab American writer, my fiction attempts to create threads of memory, of family, of stories, that connect us back to a similar space.

The plot of my novel in progress, Gentille Alouette, follows a sixteen-year-old female poltergeist named Alouette Tansy as she navigates her complicated relationship with her mother, Rhododendron “Rho” Tansy. Alouette is a violent entity, born out of her mother’s long simmering and manifested angry after Rho witnesses a catastrophic event as a child. Separated from her mother and raised by her grandmother, Elzina “Nona” Tansy, Alouette must come to grips with her otherworldly physicality and strange abilities all while trying to comprehend her own existence and sense of humanity. The short story, Rusalka Rusalka, follows a young girl named Remmie who is suspended from her high school after assaulting another student. She finds herself on work detail in the Great Dismal Swamp aiding Rusalka, the mysterious wife of a renowned marine biologist. Rusalka’s instability and affinity for exotic fish prove much more treacherous that Remmie could have ever imagined.

ACCOUNT BOOK By Lynda Fleet Perry, MFA A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University. Virginia Commonwealth University, 2014 Major Director: Thesis / David Wojahn, Professor, English Department

In my artwork, I merge nature with typography. I use macro-level photography to capture details of nature, such as the pistils of a flower or the sensory hairs of an insect. I print enlargements and transfer these photos onto pages of poetic text about nature, or collage them onto canvas. Once transferred, I use multiple media to alter and enhance features of the photos. I intentionally obscure much of the text which allows me to place focus on the overall layout and design. The arrangement of lines of text and spacing of words is used to create a visual rhythm. The poetic script acts as a foundation or platform for presenting the often unnoticed elements of nature. In developing a piece, I use a wet transfer which allows me to obtain subtle textures and imperfections that occur from the process. To add visual interest and complexity, I continue to manipulate the surfaces with various media and marks. This approach helps to create a blending of text and image. Similar to reading a poem or observing nature, I want to engage the viewer in an experience of visual poetry.

Les Bon Temps is a collection of nine essays written about New Orleans between 2005 and 2007. Though not specifically about the effects of hurricane Katrina on the city, this collection provides a personal glimpse of post-Katrina New Orleans though the eyes of the author. The essays address subjects such as race relations, public protest, tap water quality, post-traumatic depression, energy monopolies, lifestyle, culture, and evacuation.

A novel about a man injured while working on an oilrig in the Gulf of Mexico, set primarily in Louisiana, Nevada, and California. While recovering from his injury, the protagonist is contacted by his dead brother’s daughter—a person whom he did not know existed—and he journeys to San Francisco in search of her.

This play is a comedy which revolves around the importance of a French Chair (Louis Xiii) in the life of a family. A young newlywed woman discovers that her husband has a "secret" half sister born out of wedlock. Her mother-in-law has had an affair with a French man, but her husband always believed she had been abused. The young lady senses something is not clear and decides to look for her "half" sister-in-law. She does and manages to organize a get-together to bring everyone in the same place and finally understand what really happened. Eventually, her mother-in-law, now a widower, falls in love again with her ex-lover and they decide to marry. The French Chair was a reason of fights in the young couple and with the mother-in-law. But at the end we learn that young lady's half sister-in-law was conceived on this chair.

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