A collection of short stories and personal essays, Please Don’t Interrupt Me While I’m Ignoring You weaves a lamé of humor and private desperation on the page. An actor in one story craves career gratification, while a United Nations coordinator in another finds herself attracted to a nervous NGO. A housewife attempts to convince her husband to commit an infidelity, while an architect finds that his new pet companion isn’t helping him to get over his ex-girlfriend. Having a difficult time relating, these characters often find themselves stuck in a miscommunication loop, and their journey to get what they want is subtle. These stories are followed with essays about the author’s own experiences while he was stuck in a miscommunication loop. Driven by his obscene fear of conflict, the author chronicles what happens when conflict is inevitable. Travel and self-loathing abound in these narratives depicted with sensitivity and sarcasm—bitterness and love. Together they leave a lasting impression of the impermeability of worldly citizens, and the internalizations they have to combat to get there

My thesis, a collection of personal essays, explores my parents' affinity towards their native Colombia and how this connection to their homeland, through their faith and their customs, affected my definition of self. When I think about my parents' emigration from Colombia to the States, I picture the illustrations in the Bible I had as a child: the couple running from Sodom and Gomorra, running away from the place they had always known and holding on to each other. My parents, like the couple in the Bible, were in the middle of nowhere when they first set foot on the cold, concrete streets of New York City. In the Bible, the man knew he was in a better place, the cities left behind him becoming more and more of a distant memory. The next picture showed a statue of salt in the shape of the woman. The woman had turned back. Shortly after they married in Colombia, my mother looked forward to a future in another country. She urged my father to seek a better life for them in the United States. My father was the one who couldn't help but look behind him, despite the consequences. The thesis chapters explore such issues as the consequences of leaving home; the impact of my father's incarceration upon his Catholic faith and upon the family; how travel to Colombia with my parents revealed new aspects of their personalities and beliefs; and my own efforts to understand and meditate upon my multicultural heritage and surroundings.

Potential Energy. (Under the direction of Pat Rushin.) Potential Energy is a collection of sixteen short stories. They range from the fictional to the autofictional to the entirely non-fictional. In all of them, characters both real and imagined struggle to live and define themselves in a world that is outside their control. They cope with the inevitability of loss, dangers both internal and external, and the passing of their own greatness. Some of these characters become lost while others learn to embrace life on its own terms'to accept 'without hope or expectation.' More often, they are not lost or enlightened, but simply survive to continue on, still uncertain. Though all the stories in Potential Energy are stand-alone, they are thematically connected. The themes of family and identity are most prominent in 'Potential Energy' and 'Eulogy to Maria Mamani, Fire-Eater.' Loss is confronted and the question of what comes next is asked in 'Oysters' and 'Slide.' The conflict between fate and the need for control rises to the surface in 'Threshold,' 'The Elizabeth Years,' and the non-fiction story of Charles Whitman's deadly rampage in 1966, 'Seed.' Themes of ambiguity, moral erosion, and literary exploitation appear in the non-fiction 'Bright and Loud and Then Gone,' about a landlord burned alive in Chicago in 2008, and 'What It Might Have Been Like If We Had Been There,' an apologetic for the writer's right to write inspired by the 2007 Al Mutanabbi Street car-bombing in Baghdad, Iraq. Most importantly all the content of Potential Energy tells stories of people trying to hold on to what is good when, tragically, everything must eventually come to an end.

Willing to overstep literary conventions in order to ensure that meaning and purpose reign over structure, cross-genre writing works to push boundaries of genre and tear down the walls of limitation. This cross-genre thesis aims to test literary restrictions of structure and style and, as literary endeavors often do, to rattle our existence. In this thesis, nonfiction and fiction work together to drive meaning to the surface of the page, meaning that is universal in the individual stories as well as in the human experience. Although some characters are fictional and some real, they often intersect, their journeys and discoveries merging into one. The many voices of this thesis, while diverse, speak to similar themes and meaning. The main character of "Silhouettes," a homosexual male who yearns to find his identity away from the place he once called home, experiences feelings of abandonment and loss. The narrator of "A Crimson Trail" longs to uncovers truths about her uncle's suicide and endures similar feelings of loss. "Abandoned Laurels" explores a complex mother-daughter relationship and wades through themes of mourning, regret, and shame. The remaining stories explore similar themes, including those of longing, death, and familial relationships. Shorter pieces are scattered amongst longer works and supplement themes developed in the thesis. Each section contributes to the characters' longing for identity, recovery, and understanding of the past. These related characters and their stories--both real and fictional--merge in a collective endeavor to sift through loss, explore the past, and, most importantly, find identity and hope in the future amidst the rubble of the present.

The Other in mainstream U.S. society—in this case, the Latino Other—faces oppressive forces in the journey to find belonging. Latinos are marked by stereotypes, regardless of whether such stereotypes have a factual foundation. Latinas specifically are labeled as submissive servants, maids, or nannies. On the other end of the spectrum, Latinas are exotic and enticing sexual beings that must satisfy white men’s fetishes and lechery. Through this thesis, I will explore what Latina women face as an Other that is paradoxically both rejected and desired and evokes aversion as well as awe. In this creative thesis, in creative nonfiction, poetry, and oral history interviews with Latinas in my life, I will survey and expose stereotypes of Latinas, with the goal of uplifting the voices of such women of color and helping bridge the gap of understanding between the “average American” and their “Othered” Latino neighbors. If the non-Latino American public becomes educated on topics such as xenophobia and anti-Latino discrimination, they may do their part to create a community that is more inclusive and welcomes the ethnic diversity that has always been present in America.

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