Sharing Beds, a collection of three interconnected novellas, follows young women navigating family and romantic relationships, missing sisters and mothers, sticking to routines, making new homes, adopting stray cats, reading books and trying to write. These characters feel most close to reality when they try to put their experiences and interior landscapes into writing. This collection traces the tensions between the safety of the familiar and the possibility of newness; contentment in solitude and the sudden thrill of connection; the inevitability of acting in the world and the pleasure of removing oneself to watch. / Master of Fine Arts

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The Fourth Boy is a collection of seven short stories and one novella. / Master of Fine Arts

Theories of Relativity is a post-modern novella that questions the authority of truth. Multiple perspectives are utilized in the narrative to recount how the murder of a young girl has affected the tragedy's survivors. The focus of the narrative is not to determine the innocence or guilt of the accused, but to show how perspective influences our perception of truth. Eighteen pages of prefatory remarks comprise the body of an essay that explores the parameters of truth.

Thundershowers, an original novella, represents one person's perception of relationships between women and men. The first-person narrator, Anna Slone, records her limited observations of married and unmarried couples while she pursues her own involvement with a man. She observes nothing admirable in any of the relationships between men and women in the story, and her own romance falls short of her expectations. The only nurturing love that she records passes between herself and two other women, her mother and a friend. Thundershowers is not meant to be a suggestion that all woman-man relationships are soulless or that real love can exist only between women. Set in a Colorado resort, the action focuses on several concurrent love-interests, including a faltering marriage, a traditional marriage, the engagement of two young lovers, a lighthearted sexual affair, and the short-lived but painful romance of Anna and a man whom she meets at the resort.

The Last Educations: Genre, Place, and the American University consists of three interlocking novellas dealing with themes of change and dislocation in contemporary Texas, focused on the institution of the modern university, an institution that itself is undergoing rapid and irreversible change. Crucial to the dissertation is a thorough understanding and demonstrated proficiency of the genre of the novella. The creative text will illustrate how the novella can be used to achieve narrative depth and insight into the changing social context of the contemporary individual; the critical introduction will discuss the history of the genre and its emergence in recent years as a powerful vehicle for the depiction of change. The overall subject of the creative text is change, and the ways in which individuals react to change—changes to the institutions to which they devote their lives, and changes in the localities and regions they inhabit. The immediate setting for the novellas is the contemporary university, an institution currently undergoing transformations which will have implications for all of American society.

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The novella, The Girl Disappeared, focuses on the life of Emalia, a street kid from Mexico. She is taken from the streets of Veracruz and forced into a life of prostitution on the fictitious island of La Isla de Santa Flora. The primary conflict that drives the action of the story is her pending choice between escaping her life of slavery and saving another young woman who is on the verge of being forced into a life of prostitution as well. The novella, as a literary piece, dwells on the question of character agency and explores the multilayered nature of code switching. Language for these women becomes a tool in their struggle against their captives and a means of self-preservation, or sanctuary, as they use their growing bilingualism to foment a limited agency, to act in their own defense.

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