Writing/Marketing Portfolio
Written Works
I typically write novels in the realm of horror & thriller and include speculative elements. My works are typically aimed for older teens, 16-19 year-olds, with some crossover appeal. Considering children read slightly older, I aim to fill the gap between typical young adult and adult, when not strictly writing adult fiction. I feel it’s important for teens to have avenues to process stressful situations via escaping to fictional worlds, while providing them with the tools of how they can —or cannot— process their feelings, and find the power within.
Black Hole Son is my MFA thesis: a young adult psychological thriller with crossover appeal. It received the Edward J. O'Donnell Award for pushing the boundaries of genre. This novel is currently being queried.
My master's thesis in publishing, "The Evolution of Transgender Young Adult Literature," is available to read for free on my Ko-fi. This thesis seeks to analyze the impacts of sociopolitical events on young adult publishing and analyze the trends of the traditionally published young adult titles regarding transness in the past roughly 20 years, using four different titles as case studies: Luna by Julie Anne Peters, Being Emily by Rachel Gold, Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas, and Hell Followed With Us by AJ White. What does the future look like for trans-YA stories? And what might benefit authors and agents to know about the publishing trends from the publisher’s side, and the desires of the readers’ side going forward?
"3 O'Bloom" is a young adult short story featured in Artemis 2017-2018 (print and digital). Artemis is the Savannah College of Art and Design's annual literary journal featuring the best work of students with Writing majors and/or Creative Writing minors, chosen by the accomplished faculty members consisting of bestselling novelists, authors of creative nonfiction, memoirists, journalists, and columnists.
A Mock Re-release Marketing Campaign for 99 Fear Street: The First Horror
When I heard Fear Street was being adapted into a Netflix series during my promoting children's books class, I decided to use 99 Fear Street: The First Horror as the basis of imagining a re-release and creating a marketing campaign centered around it. I wrote all of the copy you see below and created all of the covers, social media graphics, and bookmarks myself.
Query Letter Resource &
Workshop Series
Aside is the resource I created for the Savannah College of Art and Design's Writer's Studio to stay in their digital and physical resource library. After doing independent research by taking a Writer's Digest Query Letter & Synopsis class, referring to Jane Friedman's blog, and analyzing query letters where the author signed with an agent and the book was published, this was what I created. This guide could only be 1 page long due to the resource requirements, otherwise, I would have gone into much more detail.
Following this guide, I created and gave a workshop about querying agents for people who wanted to pursue traditional publishing. The workshop became an interdepartmental collaboration between the tutoring center and the writing department where a professor offered to assist attendees to refine their query letters and synopses.
