Creative Writing Commons^™

From A Long Line Of Thieves, Lucinda Zamora-Wiley

Theses and Dissertations

This is a work of original creative writing, containing works of poetry, prose poems, flash non-fiction, and personal essays. The primary subject areas include family relations after PTSD, love, interracial struggles within marriage and family, pride of place--including Texas and the United States, and poetic/artistic inspirations that influenced the author.

If This Heart Had A Mouth: A Forbidden Romance Narrated Through Mimesis: Poems, Julieta V. Corpus

Theses and Dissertations

If This Heart Had a Mouth consists of forty-two poems where love is the catalyst for a multitude of emotions, ranging from falling in love, to hopelessness, to a begrudging kind of acceptance at losing the beloved to somebody else. To create all forty-two poems, 23 written in Spanish, and 19 poems written in English, I employed the literary device called Mimesis which entails deriving an original poem from someone else's work.

To create each poem, I followed another poet’s original work, line by line. I imitated that poet’s rhythm through their use of meter. I counted the number of …

Save My Sins For Sunday, Gabriel Leal

Theses and Dissertations

This is a collection of poetry that depicts the struggles of family separation, to the street and drug life, to the questioning of faith and religion, to the revelation that education was the only means of escape. Set in the Rio Grande Valley, this collection allows the reader to travel though the rough streets of South Texas where anger, pain, and joy coincide. Embedded in a Tex-Mex voice, I take you through my experiences that allowed me to see that there was no future for me in the streets and that I would rather be institutionalized by universities, rather than …

Soldier's Heart, Thomas Henry Pate Iv

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Soldier’s Heart is a collection of stories about Preston Henry, a Special Forces Operator, doing what he must to survive combat and what he must--a quest just as harrowing-- to find peace back home. The stories of Soldier’s Heart are interwoven in theme and plot, each story dovetailing with the next. It is a collection that shows not all war wounds can be seen.

The Canción Cannibal Cabaret And Other Songs: Feminists Of A Dystopian Future Repurpose A Punk Past, Amalia L. Ortiz

Theses and Dissertations

This collection of poem-songs is an experiment in combining poetry and theatre. Focused on the theme of revolution and inspired by current issues of social justice, the manuscript is set in a not-so-distant future. After an environmental apocalypse, a refugee raised under an oppressive state, La Madre Valiente studies secretly to become the leader of a feminist revolution. Her emissaries roam the land telling her story, educating others, and enlisting allies in revolution. My goal is to transform the text into live theatrical performances so that the manuscript serves both as a poetry collection and as a script. Some critics …

Smoked Blood And Lavender, Diana L. Elizondo

Theses and Dissertations

My project is a demonstration of how the Gothic genre can still have an influence in contemporary poetry as well as how the traditional forms can still be effective when developing diction and originality. This project is a collection of poems that addresses a range of issues in society and politics, as well as the deconstruction of the notions of romance in everyday life. In the introduction to my thesis, my poems are analyzed stylistically, as well as the themes they represent and the sources that influenced them. Furthermore, my poems are divided in five sections and each focuses on …

Why Everything Is A Whole Lot Of Nothing Worth Losing Or Getting Back, David Kinzer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In these three stories, David Kinzer answers the collection’s title with the precision of the hard sciences. In “The Humanist,” the strained relationship between a father and son becomes even more complicated when the son marries. In “Château Royale,” a young woman moves into a new home with a dark history. The final piece, “Starting After Midnight,” follows two young people in the aftermath of a one-night stand. All of everything is inside: Gatling guns and The Birth of Tragedy, Anne Rice and Taco Bell, kit foxes and sex tips. The answer is waiting. All you need to do is …

Future Flowers, Eszter Takacs

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This is a book-length poem presented in three untitled parts.

Grieve If You Want, Travis Scott Ray

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This collection of short stories is trying to say something about empathy. It’s trying to connect with readers in an effort to convey some small kind of emotion the characters are experiencing. It’s about the difficulty we all have connecting and communicating with each other and ourselves.

The Debt And Other Poems, Kevin Corbett

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A selection of poems, translations, and imitations written from 2009-2015.

The Fallen Female: A Testimony, Husney Farwa Naqvi

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a collection of thematically related nonfiction works that offers a cultural critique of the author’s three cultures – Pakistani, American, and Muslim – through a feminist lens. The author attempts to offer an intersectional feminist’s insight based on her lived experiences as a Pakistani American woman – born in Karachi, raised in Louisiana and the Rio Grande Valley in Deep South Texas. It explores feminist theory, focusing heavily on rape culture (“Shame and Regrets,” “Bollywood’s Rape Fetish”) and religious influences (“Infallible,” “The Hijab”). It also details the author’s experience as a Muslim woman who chose to observe …

You Either Laugh Or Cry, Laura Espinoza

Theses and Dissertations

You Either Laugh or Cry is a collection of bilingual flash non-fiction stories. Through the use of language the writer has employed code switching and humor to retell memories of her of childhood through young adulthood. Although the collection includes various members of the writer’s family, the short-shorts mainly focus on the mother-daughter relationship.

Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species [Short Stories], Leslie Samuels Entsminger

English Theses & Dissertations

The stories in this compilation, some in a realistic vein and others set in alternate realities, explore themes of loss by examining various “world gone wrong” scenarios where the main characters lose some form of control. By classifying the stories according to Taxonomic nomenclature (Kingdom, Phylum, etc.,) the stories slot into categories that both hint at the content of the story and imply a universality of human experience. Throughout the compilation, protagonists, attempting to understand their loss, must work out how to proceed—either in concert with or against—the ethical framework created within the story.