Without Blood is a memoir-based poetry and prose collection that engages with conflict in culture, identity, and translation. The various poetry and prose pieces presented here evolved from the heart of a conflicted identity (mine). The final body of work invites many instances of language, identity, and culture (written, unwritten, photographed, spoken, unheard) to conflict and interlace.

In this story, a woman’s sense of direction keeps flipping, up and down, and so she spends

all afternoon climbing the stairs, where three generations of women live, alone, for 600 years,

haunting and reconstructing their habitats.

of color is an experimental memoir about painting and about colorism.

On the verge of the Great Recession, Vlora Sulejmani––an isolated, jobless, and frustrated young Albanian-American woman who spends most of her time with her grandmother in Climbing Rose Nursing Home and Eldercare, Assisted Living Suites Attached––is struck unexpectedly by stigmata. After a YouTube video of Vlora’s bloody experience goes viral, she finds herself caught between a developing American religious movement and her grandmother’s unspoken past. The novel uses experimental techniques to explore the dissociative postcolonial experience, and argues that imperialism, homophobia, and Christian hegemony are, like, pretty bad for you, actually.

Uncertainty Index is a hybrid prose-poetry-code investigation of technological intimacies and entanglements. This work contains the data-driven poetic text "Uncertainty Index" and the chatbot performance text "Ladymouth."

My Side of the Ocean by Shelby Driscoll Salemi is the thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of Master of Fine Arts in Writing at the University of California San Diego, 2018, to Professor Anna Joy Springer, Chair. In investigation of the genre possibilities of ‘ecohorror,’ My Side of the Ocean is a speculative novella which explores environmental and social themes. The protagonist of this novella, Beth, narrates a nightmarish time in her family history.

A book of poetry that reimagines the reality of the Mexico–U.S. border.

Mammoth is a lyric-narrative of hybrid writing that consists of three years of creative and critical research. It is the poetry of collapse, where phenomena folds into memory and skin and vise versa. The text accepts and challenges concepts of separation though maximalism, minimalism and sound as well as narrative, abstract content and structure that oscillates through experimental and referential language. It is a manuscript without a map. Where the reader learns how to navigate as the text examines places and concepts of ecological crisis in relationship the California water crisis and other landscapes of addiction. Mammoth explores personal, abstract and physical loss as an intimate and critical conversation into the possibilities of loss as a shifting paradigm that gestures beyond of binary patterns of reduction.

Home Remedies is a collection of linked essays which merge memoir and discursive considerations of mental illness, care, ambition, and contemporary culture. The thesis consists of four essays, each centering an aspect the author’s personal and familial experiences with chronic and mental illness. The first essay explores a subcultural, post-anarchist milieu, and its positions towards contemporary lifestyle practices and domesticity as sites of happiness and being well. The second essay is about fantasies of creative success, imposed narrative arcs, and the schizophrenia of the author’s younger sibling. The third essay braids explorations of Siegfried Kracauer’s “Mass Ornament” and Marie Kondo’s The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up with explorations of the author’s own domestic aspirations and chronic illness. The fourth essay examines meaning-making from illness as well as the impact of received narratives through woven meditations on family history, homelessness, psychoanalysis, myth, self-determination, and diagnosis. The research and creative practice which built this thesis especially concerned the overlap between cultural understandings of illness and of literary form. Its own form is a result of experiments with narrative sequencing to enable the simultaneous staging of story and the unfolding of questions.

The Technoshaman’s Grimoire is a cross-genre experimental text. It combines spells with fiction, memoir and poetry, exploring ancient and high tech worlds.