WRITING
POETRY
SECOND SURFACE
Poetry
A meditation on identity and cognitive change. The poem explores the unsettling distance that can emerge between the person you remember being and the person you experience yourself as becoming, particularly when memory, language, and thought no longer feel entirely reliable.
THE SOUND OF GRAVEL
Poetry
A poem about the way chronic illness reverberates through an entire family. As illness confines one family member, the strain reshapes the relationships around her, revealing how fear, disagreement, and helplessness can fracture a family that is already struggling to hold itself together.
REWRITTEN IN LIGHT
Poetry
A poem about discovering a sense of self through performance. Moving from isolation into the charged atmosphere of the stage, the speaker finds that inhabiting other characters can become a way of confronting her own anger, vulnerability, and uncertainty. Through performance, she learns to embrace the parts of herself she once tried to hide and carry that sense of wholeness beyond the stage, claiming her own voice and identity in the light.
THE FORGOTTEN ONES
Poetry
A poem that begins with an abandoned doll and gradually reveals a parallel human experience: the pain of being forgotten by someone who once promised friendship forever. The fixed smile of the doll becomes a metaphor for carrying on outwardly while something inside has changed.
My work crosses genres, but many of my pieces return to questions of identity,
memory, change, illness, literature, and belonging.
Some pieces begin with a personal experience. Others begin with a character, a book, an object, or an observation. What interests me most is what happens when I stay with a question long enough for it to become more complicated.
MY PINK PEONIES
Creative Nonfiction
A reflection on living with ulcerative colitis and the experience of feeling betrayed by one's own body.
The piece explores isolation and vulnerability, but ultimately turns toward the possibility of reclaiming openness and connection rather than allowing illness to define the boundaries of a life.
STILL HERE
Creative Nonfiction
A meditation on identity, chronic illness, and persistence. The piece asks what remains when illness changes the routines and assumptions that once made life feel familiar and considers writing, reading, and music as ways of holding onto a sense of self.
GROWING UP MEANS LOSING ONE'S EDEN
Creative Nonfiction/Literary Essay
A reflection on childhood and the gradual realization that growing up means losing certain forms of innocence and certainty. The piece considers not only what is lost in that transition, but what becomes possible once the world is no longer quite so simple.
CREATIVE NONFICTION
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LITERARY WRITING
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FOOTSTEPS AND THREAD: DICKENS'S ARCHITECTURE OF MEMORY
Literary Essay
An exploration of memory in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities through three characters who respond to suffering in radically different ways. The essay examines Lucie’s transformation of memory into compassion, Dr. Manette’s struggle with
memories that fracture his identity, and Madame Defarge’s deliberate transformation of remembrance into vengeance. Together, their stories raise a larger question: how can injustice be remembered without allowing memory itself to become destructive?
ASK JANE AND CASSI
Literary Advice Column
A playful conversation between a contemporary teenager and Jane Eyre. Using Jane’s distinctive literary voice as a point of departure, the piece brings a nineteenth-century character into conversation with modern questions about independence, identity, relationships, and growing up.
DRAMA & SCRIPTWRITING
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THE EDGE OF DARKNESS
One-Act Play
Set in a funeral home after the death of David Golding, The Edge of Darkness brings William Golding, his daughter Judy, his wife Ann, and Franz Kafka into an imagined confrontation over grief, fatherhood, and the human need to explain suffering. As William tries to understand his son’s death through the idea of darkness, those closest to David challenge him to see the person behind the theory. The play explores what happens when intellectual understanding becomes a way of looking away—and whether it is possible to begin repairing a family after years of silence, regret, and things left unsaid.
