Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Homecoming Game, Olivia Dorothy Daras

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The Homecoming Game follows 16-year-old Ellie as she discovers that growing up is a lot more difficult than she thought it would be. To her horror, high school has become less about getting good grades and more about your popularity status — or so that’s what her best friend tells her. The growing pains of being a teenager and dealing with a not-so-perfect home life culminate when something utterly insane happens: she’s asked to the Homecoming Dance by someone other than the guy she’s been kind of dating. With her social life and personal life in flux, Ellie has to …

Only The Eyes: A Novel, Jason Michael Palomo

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Only the Eyes revolves around a series of murders that take place in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, the government of which suppresses the media to maintain the nation's reputation as a safe, innovative tourist destination. After the murders are leaked to the international press and can no longer be ignored, the Sheikhs of the country. decide to procure an investigative consultant through manipulative means to help them capture the unknown suspect. Former-Special-Agent Ramon Del Toro is now a true-crime writer, and he reluctantly takes on the difficult task of creating a psychological profile of the suspect, much to the …

Como Lobos, David Andrew Place

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In a world of conflict, Storm Crow, a Comanche warrior, leads a war party making its way through Mexico and Texas, stealing horses, abducting children, and wreaking chaos as he seeks spiritual and magical power, increasing his notoriety and prowess as a warrior. During one raid, Storm Crow abducts a white child, six-year-old Wade Vance. When Wade tries to escape, Storm Crow attempts to shoot him. When Storm Crow's gun fails twice, he realizes that the boy is not meant to die and adopts him, renaming Wade, "Broken Gun," in praise of the perceived magical intervention, the gun misfiring twice, …

Black River, William Ramon Daugherty

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

None

The Healer, Crystal Hurd

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

This fictional work explores the friendship between a girl with healing powers and a boy disfigured in a farm accident.

Hedgehogs, Oscar Antonio Moreno Huizar

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

An anxious college freshman who befriends a party-loving junior girl and both hatch a plan to escape from the border to California, trying to save a mutual friend and escape their dark pasts.

Ghosts Of Madmen: A Generational Tale, Kristen Leigh Olin

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A family story depicting an immigrant family that must deal with the horrors of the past while delving through the psyche of the present. One woman's look into the deepest reaches of her American family and their generations of alcoholism and abuse and her resolution to the ghosts that haunt the family's women.

The Geometry Of Loss: A Novel, Elidio La Torre La Torre

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In the year 2025, Orlando Aniello, nicknamed “Or,” a Puerto Rican poet with a broken life, becomes a “consciousness in virtual space.” Tricked by a couple of goons that devote most of their duties to bootleg memories for people who lead dull and meaningless lives, Orlando’s personality splits into fragments. As consequence, his actual experiences blend the host’s own recollections, which accidentally upload to Orlando’s brain. If bootleg mnemonic technologies glitch, Orlando does not know who he is anymore. Indeed, Orlando/ Gogo/ Alejandro suffers anterograde memory loss, and the narrator becomes merely a voice without a body. A geometry of …

Only The Aperture, Katherine Elizabeth Seltzer

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Only the Aperture is a collection of ten short stories. Each story renders a moment in a different famous photographer's life.

The Weightless Machine, Justin David Stone

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The Weightless Machine is an original novel by Justin David Stone written to satisfy the Thesis requirements of a Master's in Fine Arts from the Bilingual Department of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at El Paso.

And Second Comes The Son, Matthew Phillips

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

'And Second Comes the Son' is a post-war noir novel.

The Man Who Took A Breath, Robert Allen Crowl

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The Man Who Took A Breath confronts the ongoing battle of good and evil and its connection to humanity's search for and defense of personal truth, mainly as it's revealed within and through human relationships. Blurring the line between right and wrong can force readers to take a breath before condemning someone else's brand of truth. People from all walks of life endure familial relationships, which estrange and comfort, tear down and build up. These stories are a series of snapshots into a variety of relationships and spiritual crusades meant to depict humanities' deep well for compassion, empathy, and love …

Living With A Hero, Grayson Edds

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Living with a Hero is an original fiction piece. It tells the story of four military wives who have to rediscover their husbands after return from deployment. The Marines come home and display different symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder.

Reckless Anxiety, Hugo Esteban Rodriguez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Preface

SCOPE OF PROJECT

Reckless Anxiety will focus on fourteen short stories that have characters who all suffer from some form of mental illness, compulsion or disorder. The title is itself a paradox, because anxiety in its general sense could make someone with it more cautious than normal. I wanted to take it to an extreme level and approach writing with the recklessness of an artist afraid of what could happen should he ever stop moving or stop dancing.

PROJECT BACKGROUND

Before I started developing my Thesis, as a writer I felt as if I was on a path with …

Las Cruces, Karen Lee Dockal

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

n/a

Secondhand City: Stolen Stories From La Limonada, Byron José Sun

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Roboton, Jupa and Calicas have just been drafted by the city of La Limonada to petrol, to rob, to intimidate, to extort, to kill and when necessary to protect those citizens that need it; as their crime spree progresses their tactics and abilities improve shaping them into criminal machines. The three new criminals will be tasked with the reality of destroying people's lives in order to insure La Limonada maintains its dominion over every citizen by controlling every aspect of their past, present and future. Many of those citizens are clueless on how they are controlled; it isn't until their …

My Mother's Daughter, Monica Vanessa Martinez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

In order to address the way the Chicano culture attempts to silence its women, My Mother's Daughter is a collection of short stories narrated by Chicanas. The collection uses the complicated relationship between mothers and daughters to highlight the conflicts that lead to the silencing of Chicanas. The collection attempts to challenge this silencing by utilizing the first person perspective to give a voice to these traditionally silenced women. Another literary technique employed is the use of dramatic irony. With multiple first person narrators in the same story the collection uses dramatic irony as a way of playing up the …

Todas Las Muertes De Lázaro, Diego Murcia

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

TODAS LAS MUERTES DE LÁZARO es una novela negra que habla de corrupción, ansias de poder, ambición y decepción. En este libro, el tema de la muerte es una excusa para hablar de todo un paí­s, El Salvador, y sus contradicciones a través del cinismo, el humor y el escepticismo. Su personaje principal, El Pí­tbul, es una representación del desamparo generalizado que el ciudadano común tiene de las instituciones del Estado. Este detective se embarca -por orden presidencial- en una búsqueda misteriosa que le requiere dar con un amo del disfraz. A medida que el investigador se interna en los …

A Son Of Mercy, Un Hijo De Misericordia, Carlos Fidel Espinoza

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A Son of Mercy is a novella that follows Charlie Cantero as he struggles to find his role in the Cantero family after the death of the family's patriarch, Braulio "Pepper" Cantero. A Son of Mercy is set along the El Paso/Juarez border and deals with issues of language, racism and sexuality.

Mother Of Three Drowns Children And Other Stories, Laura L. Stubbins

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A collection of short stories depicting fictional characters facing what is absent from their lives.

And Then It Clicked, Tanya Marie Robertson

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

And Then It Clicked is a crime fiction novel about an African-American female detective from Louisville, Kentucky who accepts a case centered on the issue of domestic violence. It tells the story of an abused woman murdered in her home. Her husband, initially suspected of the crime, has an air-tight alibi and the family asks Adrienne, the detective, to find out who killed her and why. Adrienne has had past experiences with domestic violence and the new case causes her trauma to resurface.

A Revolution In Rhetoric: Recycling The Language Of Control Through Rhetorical Activism, Jerien Elizabeth Rausch

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The English language, with its infinite space and possibility, is and can be recycled to recreate authority of voice and representations of the past. Where once language was used for creating and maintaining colonial control, now, with its careful study and critical (re)applications through fictions written as alternative versions of colonial events, it can be a source of power for the reclamations of identity, culture, religion, history, story, context, and imagination. This study (re)examines an iconic exploration and colonial narrative to highlight the rhetoric used to capture and create Indigenous Peoples and places. Additionally, this study explores how works of …

En Los Ojos, El Vacío, Camilo Castillo-Rojas

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

En los ojos, el vacío is a fiction novel.

Is the story of two men, Antonio Valbuena and Leandro Cubillos, who make a journey to their old town, localized at the countryside. There they have to collect the remains of one corpse, Antonio's son, who was murdered by an illegal armed group.