It gives me the ability to express my feelings when it feels as though speaking them out loud comes whort of how I actually feel.

This piece is about a mysterious smell in a person’s room.

While writing my project I decided to write about my story growing up and the love I have for my family and the love they’ve shown me no matter what.

I wrote this piece after my brother had just left for college.

Shadow Cliffs is a beach in Pleasanton CA.

One thing I find most beautiful about poetry is its ability to communicate profound and meaningful ideas in a short space—an idea that was initially unfamiliar with when I primarily wrote fiction.

This short story is a piece of a larger story about the Devil who adopts two children from Earth.

People my age are at a stage in their lives where there they have to make decisions about their futures, before knowing who they truly are yet.

Not long after the Apalachee High School Shooting in September, I was sitting in my calculus class at school, daydreaming about everything but calculus, when I began to think about what I might do if an active shooter appeared on our own campus.

I wrote this in September in honor of Suicide Awareness Month as my perspective on what I would observe and how I would feel if I ended my own life and was still able to see my loved ones.

In our project class we have been learning about addiction and how drugs affect the brain.

This story is about a woman named Lusia who was murdered on her nightly walk.

This was written over the summer as a reflection of grief and memory, drawing inspiration from both my own life and what I have observed in the world around me to craft a piece reflecting my own thoughts and emotions.

I believe that in order to grow you have to leave certain people and habits behind.

While making this project I was learning about the struggles of homelessness in the city I grew up in, San Francisco.

The price of academic ambition.

I had always been fascinated by my grandmother––an older woman, she remained an enigma to me, secretive about her past.

Writing poetry is a process that requires finding a balance between sharing personal experience and letting the reader see themselves within the words.

I wrote this based on what I feel but can’t express to others in a straightforward manner, a sort of way to cope and constrain myself from my own mind.

In a break from my ordinary writing routine, I pieced this poem together over months, pulling parts from conversations hidden in shakshouka dishes, from gum stuck under pews I rarely sit on and the grating of Purim noisemakers. It’s a work of intention, even as I partially resisted its creation.