Selected Theses and Essays

2023-2024

Emma Matthews

Little Miss Dysfunctionality and Other Unpretty Thoughts

A collection of six short stories about love, family, and an attempt to move on from that which binds the narrators to their pasts.

2022-2023

Lindsey Odorizzi

Tell Me What This Is

A collection of five short stories about relationships that don't fit neatly into their boxes, whether it be friendship, family, or something in-between. The narrators all observe the world around them with a keen eye while struggling to understand themselves and their own desires.

2021-2022

Lily Darling

Not Forgiveness, but Something Close

A collection of short stories told from the perspective of flawed narrators reckoning with the beauty of human connection and resiliency.

2020-2021

Nico Léger

Identified patient

This poetry collection works toward subverting and making new meanings of familiar fairytales, subsets of pop culture, and daily life under consumer capitalism. These culturally-bound narratives emerge as erasing and splitting the speaker's self-identity, complicating girlhood, grief, and loss. Shadowed by projections of mental illness and insanity, these poems experience the normalization of gendered violence as it presents the need for transformation.

Lissa Sangree-Calabrese

"Knight in the Rear-View Mirror" 

This honors project poetry collection welds together the world of Arthurian literature and of the modern-day to explore close friendship, family, and how stories are retold.

Mendel Weintraub

Sanctification (Screenplay)

Dovid Greenfield, a 19-year-old Orthodox Jewish man, comes to terms with his sexuality in the wake of a family wedding, and major developments in the American gay rights movement in the summer of 2015.

2019-2020

Abby Berkower

"Kainan na! (Time to Eat)"

Kevin Costa

"An Ocean Wide Enough"

Tafara Gava

"The Philosophers Widow"

Nicole Zador

"The Family Myth"

2018-2019

Rebecca Kahn

“Daughter Of”

My Senior Creative Writing Honors Project was a collection of poetry about my ever-shifting self-identity as a female Jewish American navigating anti-Semitism, familial and personal relationships, and the experience of leaving home. I have lovingly called it a “self portrait” of my life as a college student looking back on the most formative years of my life to date. 

2017-2018

Dylan Hoffman

"Sweet Oklahoma Water and Other Stories" 

A collection of stories about how our childhood shape us, and whether we can transcend those limits to discover new identities.