Reconciliation is a novel that focuses on JoAnna Morgan, a thirty-two-year-old woman living in Lexington, Kentucky. Already struggling with her job as the director of a local performing arts center, JoAnnaâs world is thrown into disarray when her parents announce they have decided to leave their current spouses and reunite more than twenty years after their acrimonious marriage ended. Their reconciliation causes painful memories from the past to resurface for JoAnna and her older brother, Gregg. This personal crisis further jeopardizes JoAnnaâs job because her fatherâs wife is the daughter of an influential member of the theaterâs board of directors. In the midst of trying to cope with the repercussions of her parentsâ decision, JoAnnaâs former boyfriend, Karl, comes back into her life. As the novel progresses, JoAnna confronts her past and makes choices that will alter her future.

This collection of poems examines Latino migration to the United States from the perspective of a Central American immigrant on U.S. soil. The poems pay particular attention to the Mexican/American border landscape, the nostalgia of the homeland, the condition of Latino immigrants in the South, and the struggles associated with assimilation. Through surreal imagery, echoes of Latin-American poetry, and Mayan allusions, the poems represent the contemporary Latino experience: a battle of past, present, American, and Latin forces.

This is a collection of original poetry.

A Final Day in the City is a novel which covers a day in the lives of Lucy Weathers, a high school history teacher in Seattle, Washington, and Dix, a member of a mysterious group of individuals who are given extreme powers and charged with killing various people, people who are seemingly chosen at random by an unknown higher power. Dix's present task is to kill Lucy, but Lucy, for reasons unfathomable, is given a 24 hour reprieve. In that period, Dix and Lucy traverse Seattle in a desperate attempt to discover why she has been chosen, and if there is any way for either of them to avoid their fates.

Everything the Way It Was is a collection of poetry.

This thesis is a collection of original poems written to fulfill the MFA thesis requirement.

"The Air Around a Dead Man" is a collection of poetry.

Emperors, Ghosts, and Fools is a collection of linked fantasy short stories culminating in a novella. The charactersâ concerns center on trying to reach Modus Perfectus, a musical utopia located in a just-out-of-reach island chain called the Apogean Islands in the Brimful Puddle. Those who yearn for Modus Perfectus include a hideously ugly woman who serves as a town troll, a gonzo architect, a music hater, a music addict, movie actors, rock stars, and sad sack birthday clowns. Their stories unfold, always with plenty of humor, in the form of told-beside-the-fire ghost tales and small town coming-of-age or small town has-been tales, in the gothic lair of a mad scientist, in the suspense of escaping a derailing train, or in the desire for one last chance at love despite being dead. The novella that resolves the action is set inside the Apogean Islands. Here the would-be citizens of Modus Perfectus meet the three Apogeans who will lead them, and discover a future much different than the one they had originally envisioned.

The Saphead is a collection of poems that attempts to examine how creative sensibilities take shape within an individual. The poems are arranged into sections to show the evolution of those sensibilities as they emerge out of formative experiences, are changed by adulthood, and ultimately become part of an entire artistic tradition.

Keeping the Bones is an original collection of poetry.