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Instructions for Transcending the Human Body
No full textInstructions for Transcending the Human Body is a poetry collection exploring themes of transhumanism, digital identity, gender, queer identity and expression, mythmaking, and queer relationships. Split into two sections spanning the digital and the transcendentally personal, the collection examines the desire to change one’s form and how outside forces and persons shape that process.
Poems span forms, from mathematical to the lyric essay—instructional and devotional alike. The collection likens the people in the author’s life to deities; found family that has god-like influence on the shaping of a transitioning person. It explores those relationships—romantic, platonic, transcendent—and how they are new myths in the creation of something more than human.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis
"A Luta Continua": George Houser in the Peace, Civil Rights, African Liberation, and Anti-Apartheid Movements
No full textGeorge Houser was a leader in four important social movements during the twentieth century: the peace, civil rights, African liberation, and anti-Apartheid movements. In September 1940, the US Government passed a peace time draft with the Selective Service Act. Houser was a member of the Union Eight who defied that law and served prison time for his civil disobedience. In 1942, Houser co-founded the Committee (later Congress) of Racial Equality that used non-violent direct action against Jim Crow; he led that organization from 1942-54. In 1952, Houser co-founded the Americans for South African Resistance which supported the ANC and SAIC in the Defiance Campaign. After the Defiance Campaign ended, Houser formed a new organization called the American Committee on Africa; he led that organization from 1954- 81. Houser embodied the connections between the American civil rights and the African liberation movements because he utilized personal relationships he had established with both movements which synergized his activism. After his retirement, Houser remained active in the peace and anti-apartheid movements. As a figure, Houser can serve as an embodiment of the connections between the Civil Rights and African Liberation Movements. The connections he made with figures central in both facilitated Pan-African connections between the movements. This dissertation also forms a nexus between U.S. policy in Africa and domestic civil rights. Since the ACOA had a policy of supporting African independence and sovereignty wary of interference by the superpowers, the dissertation also examines the role of a non-governmental organization, the ACOA, and its often contentious relationship with the U.S. government over those African policies. The ACOA led the American anti-Apartheid movement from 1952 until the free elections in 1994. Its collaboration with numerous local, national, and international organizations played a key role in getting comprehensive sanctions passed over Ronald Reagan’s veto in the 1980s. While contemporaries were aware of Houser’s contributions, historians have failed to acknowledge his impact on these movements.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Histor
Malas: A Novel
No full textInspired by Mexican-American folktale, La Llorona, (the Weeping Woman), Malas is a work of fiction. The novel is set in the early 1990s, in Las Cienegas, a fictional town on the Texas-Mexico border. Nerdy high school freshman by day, wannabe rock singer by night, fourteen-year-old Lulu Muñoz is out to make her mark on the world in spite of her complicated father, Julio Muñoz.
When her father’s relationship with a married woman brings violence into Lulu’s life, and he reacts by shutting her out, Lulu decides to take matters into her own hands. She sets out to find the truth about her father while keeping him from discovering her own secret life. She’s the front-man for a high school punk band, Pink Vomit. She’s sneaking into night clubs across the Mexican border. Battling her father for her own autonomy, she breaks the family taboo and seeks out Pilar Aguirre, her estranged biological grandmother, and the woman who, local history says, tried to drown Julio at birth.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis
American Millennial and Between Drowning and Drought
No full textBoth American Millennial, a poetry collection, and Between Drowning and Drought, a memoir, interrogate the overlap between personal and collective traumatic events by looking at the defining moments of my own adolescence alongside the defining moments of my generation – the much-maligned millennials. Split into three primary sections covering the years 2001, 2008, and 2020, American Millennial acts as a personal and generational archive in verse, using a variety of poetic forms and overlapping narrative threads to examine the connection between iconic national moments and personal life events. Between Drowning and Drought, as a coming-of-age memoir, tells some of the same stories as the poetry collection, but finetunes the lens, using ecosystems of water to explore the unraveling of my family and the outsized impact military life had on our – and the nation’s – environmental, physical, and psychological health.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis
American Corpus: The Subversion of National Biopower in Post-Emancipation Literature
No full text“American Corpus: The Subversion of National Biopower in Post-Emancipation Literature” centralizes the practice of racialized slavery as a framework for interpreting economic contours of corporeal-based public policy as illustrated in U.S. American fiction after Emancipation. Investigating literary evidence of (neo)liberal bio-policies across divergent identity categories, “American Corpus” takes to task historical moments of state-sanctioned bodily oppression by engaging representations in literature by Charles Chesnutt (1887-1925), William Faulkner (1932), Carson McCullers (1940), Eudora Welty (1970), and Jesmyn Ward (2011). This examination is performed through a rubric that the author terms anteliberalism, which traces the long arc of American (neo)liberalism back to racialized slavery in order to conceptually foster intersectional subversion of national biopower. Anteliberalism triangulates corporeality, capitalism, and citizenship within slaving practices, tracing capitalist bio-policies as they are reincarnated throughout U.S. history and replete within national literature.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis
Earth of Inedible Things
No full textThis dissertation is a collection of poetry that takes as its subject matter both rural America, predominantly the environs of southern Appalachia and Mississippi, and the theme of familial dissolution. In doing so, this dissertation frames familial dissolutions, my own and ones of myth and history, in terms of the idea of a fragmented and dissolving sense of “southern-ness.” Overall, Earth of Inedible Things attempts to piece together what cannot be consumed, neatly or at all: the complicated Southern identity in the 21st century. Through a mix of lyric and narrative poems, this dissertation will focus on the inexorable link between the “failed” and/or “dissolving” family and the Southern/rural landscape, arguing that in order to understand one, one must understand the other. In conjunction with Romantic and Southern poetics in general, Camus’ idea of “the absurd” helps undergird this work’s scholarly and creative ambitions.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis
Sloweddd Soulzzz
No full textThis manuscript is a compilation of the poetry I've written during my time in Georgia State University's MFA Program from 2023-2025. These poems shed light on themes of music, friendship, motherhood/mentorship, spirituality, and self-actualization. Ultimately, the larger purpose of this potential collection focuses on ambition and desire of different speakers’ in their pursuit of endurance and perseverance amid adversity and life’s uncertainties.MF
Coffin for Head of State
No full textCoffin for Head of State is a collection of interconnected short stories based on the tragic real-life incident of the Ikeja Military Cantonment Bomb Blast in Lagos, Nigeria (2002) The stories follow the lives of characters whose lives are upended by the blast. It explores how some are harmed by the event, and others benefit from it, while also highlighting the broader social, cultural, and economic forces that shape their lives. The book explores themes of loss, grief, belonging, memory, and religion.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis
Sisters
No full textSisters is a short story cycle that explores the insular world of sororities and the complicated dynamics of female friendship. Set in Athens, Georgia, at the fictional University of Athens, the book centers on a small group of college women pledging the sorority Delta Theta. Drawing on the literary traditions of the campus novel and bildungsroman—as well as tropes from Greek mythology and the Southern Gothic—Sisters follows multiple protagonists as they move from the first night of Rush, through their collegiate years, and beyond, and tracks their struggles to define themselves on campus, at costume parties, and in the bedrooms of fraternity men. Sisters contains eleven short stories written as stand-alone examinations of character and sorority life, but when read together also attempt to challenge one-dimensional, made-for-TV portrayals of undergraduate women.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis