Digital Commons Network^™

Ferocious (And Tender) Survival, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

A review of Blood Loss: a Love Story of AIDS, Activism, and Art, by Keiko Lane (Duke University Press, 2024) in the Anarchist Review of Books

Threshold: Stories & Graphic Memoir, Emily Kay Lewandowski

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Threshold: Stories & Graphic Memoir, a collection of fiction and graphic memoir, explores the in-between stages of loss and grief. Both the fiction and graphic memoir pieces utilize the technique of the “narrative echo,” coined by John Gardner, to stylistically explore and interrogate these stages of in-betweenness. The final piece in this collection, “I Hope You Find Me On Mars,” is a queer expansion of Octavia Butler’s trilogy Lilith’s Brood. Each piece uses unique voice and styling to contribute to the larger literary community by interrogating manifestations of identity, queerness, and grief.

What I Was And Who I Am, And Before And After, Molly K. Del Rossi

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

This thesis begins with a critical introduction which analyzes varying forms—such as the inverted sonnet—the schools of confessional and post-confessional poetry—and how they differ—and inspiration used for my creative work in poetry. I claim to be a poet who writes primarily based on personal memories. I chronicle my initial encounters with poetry as a teenager through the lens of confessionalism, as demonstrated by Eavan Boland and Anne Sexton. To exhibit my gained knowledge, I reference poetic theorists such as Richard Hugo, Charles Olson, Adrienne Rich, Mary Ruefle, and Gertrude Stein when analyzing which theories and dialogues influence my poetic style. …

Las Pintas Interview Project 2025, Beth Gulley, Luz Alvarez, Vallerie Rogers, Gabrielle Rock, Danielle Mullins, Nina Mcnay, Jayda Diaz, Audrey Weaver, Haisie Halperin, Rita Terrones, George Newham, Esmeralda Monroy

The Las Pintas Collection

In May of 2025, after a five-year hiatus, Johnson County Community College (JCCC) resumed sending students to Las Pintas, Mexico. Traditionally, JCCC sent student from Nursing, Dental Hygiene, and Solar Energy to practice their acquired skills and serve the community at Centro Integral Comunitario (CIC). This latest trip, though, was for Spanish language students to enhance their cultural competency, language practice, and learn about opportunities to study away.

This collection contains stories from eight former JCCC Study Abroad trip members, five people who live and work in Las Pintas, and the ten current JCCC students who traveled to Las Pintas …

Mythopoesis And Gendered Power: An Akan Perspective On Stacy Waite’S A Real Man Would Have A Gun, Akua Agyeiwaa Denkyi-Manieson

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Review of Stacy Waite’s A Real Man Would Have a Gun, challenges traditional Akan gender roles and critiques the societal structures that limit women’s power.

Alive For The Wake, Anna Kate Powell

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In the year 2046, bacteria strain B. bibitor has rendered all petroleum hydrocarbon compounds unrefinable. Paramedic Amanda Bailey finds hope in the resilience of humanity but struggles when she learns the powers that be would rather concentrate their efforts on fighting B. bibitor—restoring infected hydrocarbons to their previously refinable (and profitable) nature—rather than investing in already-developed clean firm energies and renewable material manufacture.

The Filament, Elena Skibicki

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The Filament weaves together the results of a neurodivergent person exploring their universe, in all its harrowing beauty and familiar tragedy. The speaker traverses oceans and thunderstorms, wades through the swampy shallows of their high school, participates in a pharmaceutical supply chain and its subsequent ransacking, floats through altered mental states, and retells legends, spanning many styles while still using the lyric “I”. Scrying into a nebulous future, the speaker returns with stories of the planet and its people, and the kind of world they want to build.

The speaker exposes their ghosts throughout the collection, hoping that the adage, …

The Hardheaded Got To Feel It To Believe It, Magdalene Eden Luna-Buckelew

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Memoire short stories about the author’s experiences in Southern California working as an artist, exotic dancer, and going through various 12 step recovery programs and therapies to heal from childhood trauma.

Rabble: A Companion To Pwa-Tem (2025)

Rabble, 2014-

Rabble is a companion chapbook publication to the magazine Pwatem. From the preface of most issues: "'Tell the rabble my name is Cabell."- James Branch Cabell to his editor, to help people learn how to pronounce his name. Cabell used the word derogatively but we are taking it back. These pages will showcase the writing and illustrations of our rabble-the ordinary students of VCU."

Skin And Bones: Transgenerational Trauma, Experimental Storytelling, And The Texture Of Hope, A Creative Dissertation, Janine Blue

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation theorizes and enacts experimental storytelling as a method for engaging transgenerational trauma, highlighting how form shapes the ways histories are remembered, embodied, and reimagined across generations. Grounded in hope rehearsal as both a theoretical and creative framework, this project examines how BIPOC writers use experimental writing techniques to navigate the afterlives of historical trauma and reclaim storytelling as an act of meaning-making, communal care, and futurity. The dissertation begins with a critical chapter that explores these experimental techniques as strategies for recovery and resistance. The dissertations’ creative chapter, Andre Lyle: Skin and Bones, expands on these ideas …

All In The Family: Truths From A Broken Home, Susan Asher

Master's Projects

All in the Family: Truths from a Broken Home is a collection of micro-memoirs about finding strength in the aftermath of a childhood of neglect and harm. Susan Asher shares her story not as a tale of perfect healing, but as a testament to the survival skill of self‑care. Through vivid scenes of family chaos and the hard truths of abuse, she reveals how caring for oneself becomes the essential act of resilience.

This book is not only about one woman’s journey—it is about the lessons anyone can draw when life denies them safety and love. Readers will discover how …

Federal Dust, David R. Phares

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

These are fragments of my work. None of the pieces in here are complete. They are horizons and guide posts.

Riverrun 2025, Saint Mary's College Of California

Riverrun Literary Magazine

No abstract provided.

Author Bios, Author Bios

Intertidal

Intertidal Vol. 3 Author Bios

From Ink To Code, From Binary To Boundless Reality—Until All Returns To Emptiness, Weitong Sun

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the entangled relationship between language, memory, and technology through the lens of immigrant experience. Moving from programming to visual storytelling, I investigate how dyslexia, bilingualism, and cultural displacement have shaped my ways of reading, writing, and coding.

Beginning with personal reflections on switching from computer science to art, I trace how code offered a form of clarity and expression where written language had once failed me. Yet as I ventured into real-time simulation and XR storytelling, I encountered new forms of mistranslation—where narratives dissolved, mutated, or resisted coherence altogether.

Through a series of experiments in code-driven art, …

The Threadbare Saint, Lucas Khoo

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

There are roughly 280,000 migrant domestic workers living in Singapore. Many of them come from the Philippines, Myanmar, and Indonesia to work as live-in maids. About 20% of households in Singapore employ domestic workers to assist in household chores and to help care for children and the elderly. Their work is multi-faceted: they are the cooks, the dishwashers, the car-washers, the baby-sitters, the pet groomers, and the laundrymen of many Singaporean households. They play a central role in the domestic lives of thousands of families in Singapore and are undoubtedly a part of the country’s social fabric; nevertheless, they have …

Viewpoint, Year Unknown, Alan Reedy, Bob Dowdy, Bob Porter, Gretchen Hoover, Mike Proctor, Tom Landell, Al Stone

Literary Reviews Through the Ages

No abstract provided.

The Norman, Year Unknown, Sheila Dwight, Linda Ellis, Charles Elliot, Nathan Sawyer, Andy Hotz, G. D. Mcewen

Literary Reviews Through the Ages

No abstract provided.

Workable Seams, Jackson Mills Smith

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In Jackson Mills Smith’s Workable Seams, readers encounter the stories, landscapes, and lives of rural Knox County, Indiana, from the oscillating vantage of a Hoosier boy raised with a Cajun sensibility. After relocating from Louisiana to the river bottoms of the crossroad state at a young age, the speaker gradually uncovers a local history only previously understood in fragmentary shards and fading glimpses.

Alternating between semi-lyrical embodied experiences and memories, documentary pieces in conversation with the state’s historical archive, and the retelling of exaggerated local yarns, poetry is a means of inquiry in Workable Seams. Topics range from …

Girl, You Crazy, Stefani T. Flanagan

Master's Projects

The main premise behind Girl, You Crazy is to inform others of what life is like as someone who experiences psychosis (specifically schizoaffective disorder), as well as show the warning signs that I believe people should be aware of. This text is a nonlinear narrative of my personal experience that explores themes of substance abuse, hallucinations, religion, interpersonal conflict, and family dynamics starting from 2019 through 2025, through the onset of symptoms to diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder. This work also entails some of my experiences as a gay Black woman who was raised in a religious family, bullied throughout my …

Research Reimagined: The Dissertation-To-Book Journey And Building A Scholar-To-Author Presence, Seema Kumar

Master's Projects

This capstone project, completed for a second master's degree after a Ph.D., discusses aspects of transforming the doctoral dissertation on digital versus manual mediums in fashion design into a research monograph book proposal for academic publication. It reflects on a publisher's requirements and the process, including de-thesizing the dissertation, planning the book's structure, rewriting sample chapters to improve flow and readability, and creating a table of contents that demonstrates the work's development into a publishable book rather than a dissertation. Another part of the project includes developing an author platform through blog posts and platforms such as Substack, preparing the …

From The Heart: Writing Love Poetry With Ai, Dan Ryan

Open Educational Resources

The chief reason our writing students turn to AI is not "laziness.” It’s fear. This lesson plan helps college students overcome their fear of a first-time poetry assignment by empowering them to partner with “collaborators”—first AI, then each other—to co-write a love poem before finally writing a poem on their own. This 4-hour lesson plan for a college-level Introductory Creative Writing course includes three low stakes drafting and revision assignments, and culminates in a high stakes poetry assignment.

The Masa That Holds Us: Indigenous Epistemologies And The Food We Share, Necahual Gamboa

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

The U.S. higher education system is built on histories and infrastructures of colonization, white supremacy, and western imperialism. Among many of the institutions produced from a history of domination and genocide, the systems of higher education need to shift their focus to decolonial frameworks including Indigenous epistemologies (ways of knowing and being) in order to work toward true reparations between these imperial systems and the Indigenous people they have displaced and disregarded. This project brings these systems into question, but also uses art, prose, and storytelling to better align with what it means or what it could look like to …

A Story Of Oppression A Psychological And Creative Approach, Juan R. Morillo

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The aim of this project is to survey the manner in which oppression is expressed in selected works of literature. It is a topic that not only am I familiar with through my studies of literature and psychology, but one that I, as well as every Venezuelan expatriate has witnessed and felt for their country. The project focuses on social and political oppression, using the current Venezuelan crisis as a focal point, and selected literary sources as a framework. I will analyze dystopian classics such as George Orwell's 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, as well as Margaret Atwood’s The …

Literary Homeplace As A Site Of Knowing And Healing, Shamonique Hassell

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The concept of literary homeplace serves as a locus of rhetorical healing for Black women, emphasizing their lived experiences and creative expressions as forms of resistance and restoration (Collins, 1986; hooks, 1990; Nettles, 2001). The labor of Black women within families, churches, and artistic endeavors contributes to the cultivation of a collective consciousness surrounding oppression and healing (Edwards, 2010; Carey, 2016; Morrison, 1992). Building upon hooks’ (1990) notion of homeplace, this dissertation examines how Black women foster spaces characterized by care, dignity, and resilience (Hersey, 2022; Tate, 1984). Using personal narrative and articulating Black women’s voices, I position homeplace as …

Lineation To Liberation: The Transformative Power Of Poetic Rhetoric, Amber Rae Alvarez

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This project explores the transformative power of poetic rhetoric and examines how poetry as a form of expressive art serves as a means of reclamation in the aftermath of encounters with the American criminal justice system. I contend that poetry provides a space where folks can reimagine (and reclaim) their identities, asserting their agency in empowering and authentic ways. Taking a Cultural Studies and Critical Prison Studies informed approach, this project engages the concept of lineation to liberation to conduct a close reading analysis of artist (Reginald) Dwayne Betts’ poetry. Betts’ work not only provides a powerful example of how …

Analyzing Rap Through Poetry: “Zen Scientist” By Milo & Kenny Segal, Mason S. Jensen

Anthós

milo, now known as R.A.P. Ferraria, has described his music as synonymous with poetry. This article examines his song “zen scientist,” testing the linkage of poetry and rap through poetic analysis. Jensen analyzes the song through metrical systems, marking it in scansion, poetic feet, and rhyme to delineate rhythm and to show how rhythm is created and experimented with. Jensen then applies Vendler and Chan’s methods for deriving poetic meaning, providing potential interpretations of “zen scientist.” Jensen argues these poetic methods dissect the rap song into perspicuity. The article concludes that poetic analysis can be used effectively to analyze rap …

“Broken Things: An Archive”, Kristen Mccallum

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This creative thesis starts from the idea that memory is shaped as much by the present as by the past. It explores the emotional and personal complexities of family estrangement, grief, survival, and love. Inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s idea that “every generation confronts the task of choosing its past,” the project moves away from more traditional storytelling and instead is constructed as a collection of archival elements, that includes prose. What originally intended to be a collection of short stories gradually became a fictional family archive—made up of letters, text messages, and other everyday items—that reflects the messy, often conflicting …

Nothing I Said Was Enough: Writing As Self-Validation, Michama M. Dorvile

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This thesis explores the process of using writing as a coping mechanism to heal from trauma by portraying how personal narratives confront pain and reclaim agency. This thesis also explores how writing serves as a means of survival and sharing testimony. The thesis starts with a critical analysis essay, drawing on literary criticism and trauma theory. I explore how Roxane Gay, Kathryn Harrison, Bessel Van der Kolk, and Maya Angelou have used writing to challenge societal perceptions of trauma, and how through writing, they have resisted erasure.

The heart of this thesis is an original creative work, which involves an …

Phantasma, Grace Wright

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Ever since the infamous Ides of March, scholars have been debating the true psychology behind Brutus’s betrayal. The purpose of this project is to take a step back from the politicized motivations and explore the emotional, strenuous conditions of Julius Caesar’s assassination. This project will transform William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar into a novella with its central focus on the relationship dynamics between the key figures of Caesar, Brutus, and Cassius. The intention of the novella is to not only analyze the play through a critical queer lens, but to interrogate the themes of violence and desire that surround male relationships …