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Publication Spiders and Saints(2024-05) Zachar, NathanPublication Publication Living While They Expect Us to Be Dead(2024-05) Thompson, IdeThese poems are my attempts at the work of resurrection, attempts at reimagining the horrors that have existed, will exist, and are existing in my life and the lives of others. Pursuing an MFA has been both a privilege and a testing ground that has required me to go deeply into myself. The project for Living While they Expect Us to be Dead will be a polished draft of my MFA thesis. My awareness of anti-blackness and homophobia—intertwined experiences in my life between the Caribbean and the United States—is the impetus behind Living While they Expect Us to be Dead. Which is an examination of the ways in which the Black body and Black life have been relegated and transformed by the trauma of living in the wake of enslavement, anti-blackness, and homophobia in the Caribbean and the United States. I use the term Narrow Dark to describe these both singular and collective numerously complex experiences of Black subjection. The Narrow Dark is not only a poetic metaphor but also a descriptor of a psycho-social space that categorizes Blackness as a lived-in and pressurized existence. One that while seemingly without the hope of release, generates many ways of moving in, through, and out of this trauma. I define the generative power of the Narrow Dark with the term the Boundless Night to explore the ways the Black body and Black life “grow where not expected / use sight where imagined blind.” Growing up queer in The Bahamas and having to migrate for opportunity and safety has left me with a particularly visceral experience of nationality and identity. During the fellowship at Williams, I would sharpen the poems from Living While they Expect Us to be Dead into even more poignant examinations of Black Queer life in the wake of the Narrow Dark and the ways it blossoms in the Boundless Night.Publication I-75, Other Routes(2024-05) Stallins, WilliamThis thesis is a poetic examination of Southern history and culture through explorations of the founding myths of the region. These myths include the family, Christianity and the Bible, Southern language and accent, music, the natural landscape, etc. Particularly, this thesis will try to poetically identify and undermine a destructive local brand of Whiteness in an every day, lived-in way. Finally, the thesis will try to raise up the bits of nuance here or there that I know from my own experiences to perhaps oer Southerners some new perspectives on the truths we take for granted.Publication The God of Abandonment(2024-05) Rao, ShashankNirvaan Rai, a young Indian revolutionary exiled in Japan, accompanies his friend and mentor, Purushottam Das, on a long holiday to the estate of the powerful Mizuhara family on the southern coast of Japanese-occupied Korea. There, he meets the estate’s steadfast manservant, Nam Jae-seong, who is searching for his missing sister. The two strike up a passionate affair over the course of their fateful summer, carving a space of tenderness for themselves in a world descending into chaos as the Second World War looms on the horizon.Publication In Search of a Shell's Spiracles(2024-05) Okele, OluwatoyinMy thesis, the first two parts of a hypertext novel, is one of several high-water marks in my journeys in creating and reading interactive fiction. For me, there are three different ways of thinking about this project: the narrative, the technical, and how the narrative meets the technical, which I refer to as the embodied. Narrative: A nautical bildungsroman about post-school listlessness, choices and restrictions, sea monsters, and contradictory women. Technical: An investigation in creating a relatively linear story that feels variable and evokes different feelings in the reader in separate playthroughs. Embodied: A series of experiments in bringing certain elements and emotions to the surface on both the levels of narrative and interactivity. The project was coded in Twine, an HTML based software with a rich history of use by marginalized creators. I hope you enjoy playing through it as much as I did creating it.Publication Opportunity(2024-05) Paraan, NoelPublication Nova & Lotus(2024-05) Le, SammyThis is not a case-study, not decolonial. That I wield a colonial language to resist colonial violence is hardly subversive—that irony has a popular poetic luster, but it is not my formal nor aesthetic choice. I am convinced that as a deliberate lens such a choice would ultimately protect and facilitate the structures that fail me, wait upon my failure, or even, at last, fell me. Am I liberated if I convinced my masters in their tongue to free me? With their manners of speech, conventions of thought and knowledge-making? From platforms I was afforded only by complicity with or contribution to their empire? Marginalized identities can hardly exist, much less be liberated, without arguing their value to concentrated power. It is no longer, was perhaps never, revolutionary to advocate by representation. At long last, my identity and its representation become one volume in the imperial catalog. I am as speechless as I am defiant. It is my faith that when you realize my writing has no aim, no contribution, you will join me in my endless coming and going. I myself have not arrived. Take my hand. Trust me. There is a chance we will discover each other, despite insurmountable distance—I am a being of desire, therefore a being of words, a being who looks for her body and looks for the body of the other. This, Nicole Brossard continues, is the whole history of writing. Instead of viewing an instant in the lens of eternity, we can glimpse eternity in the lens of an instant. We can meet in this moment, a garden in the heart of the city. Perhaps our resistance begins in this invisible stillness, despite our constant orbit around a world perpetually restless, perpetually defining, complicating, exalting itself—ravenously laboring to annex the lunar, the other. I do not want representation. I am approaching, now, a different kind of representation: not visibility, but vision. This is my gamble: I trust your vision, I trust in mine. I believe our communion, the attempted collision of our optics in an imaginative space both idle and dynamic, is the beginning of revolution. But to posture past the beginning, we must relinquish the need for arrival, which is the final border at which all empires composed of borders collapse. I dare say we replace it with the desire for play—is that irresponsible? Whatever. Thank you for reading my book—I want to welcome you to a distant and familiar world. I have two dear friends I’d love for you to meet.Publication The Dead are Too Loud(2024-05) Charleen Rutendo ChidzodzoThe Dead are Too Loud is a collection of short stories that explore the lives of immigrants, dreamers, and the displaced. It examines themes of race, identity, and what it means to be from somewhere. The majority of the characters either live in America or Zimbabwe and they all struggle with understanding who they are against America’s political backdrop. In 'God Resides inside a Warumart', a Zimbabwean woman reflects on her assimilation struggle when she bumps into a newly immigrated grandmother in Walmart. In 'Roora', a Zimbabwean woman brings her white fiancé home; culture and generation clash at the dinner table when she announces she will not be having her traditional wedding. In 'The Grace Period', an immigrant living in an imagined America sells her native language to a white man in exchange for citizenship.Publication Publication Rest Cure(2024-05) Aleia, MaddenThis is a collection of stories exploring anxieties of womanhood, gender, and desire in aesthetic conversation with the melodrama and ambiguous supernaturality of Gothic literature, particularly 19th century feminist and 20th century gay Gothic literatures, as well as queer movements in literary criticism, gay cinema, and American counterculture.Publication A Daytime Moon(2012) Kleeman, AnneA novel submitted to fulfill the requirements of the M.F.A. degree. Subjects include the war in Afghanistan & memory.Publication A Heart, Beating, Hard(2012) Goodman, Lauren FA Heart, Beating, Hard is a novel by Lauren Foss GoodmanPublication Publication (Evol)ution Is Love Spelled Backwards(2010) Monteiro, Ericaerica monteiro’s collection, (evol)ution is love spelled backwards, is book of poetry created to give readers a glimpse into the personal politics of a woman of color coming into her own. The selected pieces are written as a journey through the writer’s heart. monteiro creates a mosaic through lyrical prose that is both tangible and illusive. Some of her pieces speak to current contemporary issues as in the poem “goodnight obama”, and others deal strictly with matters of love, as in “the last hurrah”. Each poem is flavored by its own unique brand of language reminiscent of twentieth century urban lyricism. monteiro’s “text speak” and new derivations on old words allow her to style shift between poetic lines, making for a creative blend of both academic and pedestrian imagery and symbolism. (evol)ution is love spelled backwards, is a mix of monteiro’s different voices, balanced to give her readers a unique perspective of her verses.Publication Wrap Your Body. Come Home.(2019-05) Collins-Sibley, Miles A.M.A collection of poems exploring ghosted ancestors, folktales, the queer black body, gender, and magical realism.Publication Karaoke at the Train Station(2019-05) Crescente, JosephAn American singing prodigy escapes to Russia following the death of his bandmate and stays after his last close relative – his mother – dies. It’s the late 1990s and he’s found a new home. After a decade in obscurity he makes a comeback by joining a Russian musical collective, but when they embark on a tour during the events in Crimea in 2014, accusations swirl about his past as a democracy promoter for a U.S.-funded NGO in Vladivostok. Condemned by the media as a spy, he’s eventually denounced by Rokko – the man who rediscovered him, mentored him, and became his best friend – a hybrid like him, someone with a toehold in both Russian and American cultures. He returns to the U.S. where he is also viewed warily, for he responds to criticisms of Russia by encouraging a nuanced understanding of the country at a time when there’s no patience for it. He is left without the one thing he’d always searched for: a home.Publication Talking Underwater(2019-02) Westerlund, RheanTalking Underwater is a collection of short stories that examine the universal yet intimate terrain of human relationships. The characters—lovers, family, and strangers alike— consistently seek connection, inciting nuanced questions about vulnerability, pain, and the need to be seen.Publication Broken for You(2019-05) Capps, BrittanyPublication A Lot of Blood on Body with Unknown Trauma(2019-02) Benke, AlexA LOT OF BLOOD ON BODY WITH UNKNOWN TRAUMA is a novel following X as she uncovers and absorbs the traumas that unravel her family.