The Jubilant City Almanac is a collection of short stories set in the magical Jubilant City, a city founded by a group of Black women in 1736. These stories bridge the whimsical and magical with the realities of poverty, classicism, addiction, abuse and health disparities. “Got His Alligator” follows the journey of two codependent addicts as they try to get their fashion designs onto Jubilant City’s premiere drama, Girl, Please. The characters in “Carbon Copy” use a magical phone to bring Denzel Washington to the city. “Jeremiah the Conqueror” summons Black American folk legend, High John. THrough an exploration of magical realism and speculative fiction, The Jubilant City Almanac tells the stories of Black families and Black complexity.

Gridlocks and Padlocks is a collection of short fiction and personal essays whose goal is to create characters with depth in both real-world and not-entirely-real-world situations. The strength of nonfiction is the capacity to observe the writer's thinking and motivation. "Ashes to Ashes, Trust to Dust" is a personal essay that explores my struggle with the faith I was raised in, with an emphasis on how friendships and relationships have shaped my perceptions. "The List of Unacceptable Faults" is a personal essay about unwanted interactions with the opposite sex; it is an examination of men and boys through the lens of naive dissatisfaction. "Sing Me Rebecca" is a personal essay that delves into my relationship with my mentally handicapped sister. While the nonfiction writer focuses on his or her own development and struggles, a fiction writer can investigate the human condition by exploring the depth found in imagined people who face everyday situations and what characteristics and behaviors make them believable and absorbing. "Object of Study" is a short story about a girl named Taylor, who in her formative years stumbles upon a friendship between her sister and a boy she does not trust. This story examines Taylor's quirky, multi-faceted character through the actions she takes to investigate and ultimately end the friendship between a boy and her younger sister. "Crossing Fault Lines" is a work of short short fiction that focuses on three characters-a mother and her two sons-and their strained relationship. Whether writing personal essays or fiction, my goal is to create overarching conflicts that reflect people's struggle with being "stuck" in some situation in life.

Oftentimes, the children of immigrants find themselves straddling two worlds. As Americanized minorities, we navigate torn psychological landscapes in which uneasy dichotomies are formed: living up to our parents' expectations, or fulfilling our own; embracing tradition, or birthing a new culture; admiring the lives of our family, but wanting different for ourselves. These tough decisions are further compounded by identifiers such as age, race, and gender. My creative thesis, a collection of fiction and nonfiction, examines these issues through three central characters. In fiction, they are the Latina sisters Mel and Nena; in nonfiction, it is myself. Through these stories, these young women struggle to feel a sense of belonging where they are, be it at home, work, or school; among friends or on their own; in places they choose, or in places where they are put. Each of these characters is forced to consider whether they will ever find a place to call home. They wonder whether that is a place to be found at all.

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Dream Machine is a collection which constructs a body of contemporary mythology, grappling with themes of American paranoia, online identity formation, and bodily alienation. Stories such as "Offerings" and "Pareidolia" explore the digital commodification of the body, following characters who—through Instagram-sourced sugar daddies and nude art modeling, respectively—offer themselves up freely as subjects of voyeurism and surveillance. Other stories, such as "Network Support" and "Dream Machine" involve characters who abandon their physical forms to disappear into the internet, existing as free-floating data and radiant frequencies. "Downstream," "Grass So Green," and "Little White Crosses" engage with the stark landscape of a country starved of its spirituality, where conspiracies, hallucinations, and deathly apparitions seem to possess the same inherent logic as a blue sky. / Master of Fine Arts / Dream Machine is a short story collection.

The dissertation "Modern Israeli short story" focuses on the form of the current short prose studied on the work of four of the renowned Israeli contemporary authors. Employing the method of text comparison we try to illustrate the specifics of the modern Israeli short story. The dissertation contains both the theoretical overview as well as analytical material. The authors were selected according to several criteria: two male and two female writers which enables us to determine whether "gender" plays a role - meaning if each author favors heroes of a specific gender or if they focus only on "female" or "male" contents. We also chose two native Israeli writers and two authors of foreign descent that immigrated to Israel which enabled us to study the linguistic angle and to realize whether the writer's background is reflected in his/her work. The analytical parts as well as the amendments contain a number of samples which prove our conclusions.

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