Writing Samples
& Publication Design
The excerpts provided below have been drawn from projects with a wide variety of prose styles and skill sets. Included are samples from compositions that include a master's thesis, promotional emails, CTAs, research projects, proposals, and presentations.
The Happiest Fans on Earth?
An Interview with HW
Prose Style/Tone: Media Studies, Interview,
Casual, Entertainment
Media conglomerate. Award-winning animation studio. A theme park “Where Dreams Come True.”
Disney works hard to be all things to all people; the company’s many properties are supported by a diverse fanbase. There is so much to love from movie franchises like Star Wars and Marvel to cruise lines and sports networks like ESPN.[2] For HW, who began making annual visits to Disney World when she was seven, the theme park is an object of nostalgia. She’s just one of many avid park-goers who keep coming back. We’ll explore Disney’s complicated image through her eyes.
C: How would you describe your experience as
a Disney fan?
H: Personally, I like the parks but not the company itself, because they’re huge and own everything. I love the magic in being a kid again—like you can run down Main Street and no one’s going to think you’re crazy!
Disney’s brand relies on the common ground people of all ages share...
A Chorus in the Margins:
Inscribing the Canon with Women's Literature
Prose Style/Tone: Synoptic, Critical, Introductory
Thesis and Layout by Cailie Golden
Woman's literature is a subculture that narrates life from within the dominant society. To decode an author's character, message, and diction requires acknowledging her status within this institution. As a collection of authors and critics, the dominant culture has power to define and distort a woman's image. As an audience, the dominant culture has power to overwrite, or inscribe, her work.
Literary womanhood is complicated by its own reception. The woman author's imaginative scope may be constrained; her writing—misread, moderated, or excluded. She must navigate the "totalizing... system[s] of thought" that society relies on to maintain order (Baldick). Generations of women have taken up the pen to combat what Jean François Lyotard calls the master narrative. When the master narrative establishes its bounds of convention for civilization, what was merely one interpretation of life and history becomes the standard...
Director of Digital Communications
Maintaining community and student engagement through media outreach
Prose Style/Tone: Warm, Casual, PR
Promotional content for TU EGSA
Date: 8/28/23
Subject Line: Welcome Back: Meet your EGSA Officers
Hi everyone,
The English Graduate Student Association (EGSA) would like to welcome all of our new and returning students as we kick off this new semester together. Our goal is to provide support and connection throughout your time at TU. To that end, you'll find our names and contact info attached below. As Director of Digital Communications, I'll be keeping you updated via email and social media, so feel free to reach out with questions about EGSA, our events, or even coursework in general.
Grad school may be a challenge, but it's also a community. There's so much to look forward to! We'll be hosting events throughout the year like our holiday potluck, symposia, weekly theory club, and more: opportunities to de-stress and get to know other students. We're so excited to be a part of your experience. Looking for more info? Give @egsatu a follow!
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Date: 9/19/23
Subject Line: Upcoming Event: Theory Club📚✨
Hello all,
EGSA is thrilled to announce our first theory club of the year, which will be held Thursday, September 21st at 6pm! Join us for refreshments and a casual discussion of Structuralism. Not only does theory club help us prepare for in-class discussion, but it also gives us a chance to work through intimidating concepts in a friendly, stress-free setting. Attached you'll find our readings, along with some additional resources (i.e. podcasts and videos). Feel free to engage with this material on whatever level works best for you. The goal of theory club is to explore these concepts and learn together! See you there!
Follow @egsatu on Instagram and Facebook for more updates!
Director of Digital Communications
Maintaining community and student engagement through media outreach
Prose Style/Tone: Warm, Casual
Promotional content for TU EGSA
Art in Transition:
Movements within Modernism as Showcased by the Journal transition
Prose Style/Tone: Educational, Academic, Historical
This research project will feature in the Modernist Journals Project Archives.
In 1929, Eugené Jolas published a manifesto in the experimental journal transition, expressing a desire to “emancipate the creative element from the present ideology” (British Library). Because the modernist era constitutes a time of experimentation, artistic movements arose to challenge society’s standards and established canon. Scholarly practice, when it comes to Modernism, requires a foundation of knowledge about the movements that originated from various centers of counter-culture in the early twentieth century. These centers were scattered across and beyond Western Europe, often distributing their manifestos through publication. The dialogue between those periodicals that welcomed modernist voices allowed for the collaboration and competition of ideas—despite geographical distance. Margaret Anderson’s Little Review, Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work, and Wyndham Lewis’ The Enemy were similar to transition for a number of reasons: these magazines, and others like them, used a popular medium to circulate experimental artists and writers as well as their own theories. Surrealism, expressionism, primitivism, futurism, dadaism: these concepts and more are all featured in transition, because they signaled a departure from the mainstream.
“Art in transition” is a project that endeavors (first) to create a visual guide including the era’s more prevalent isms, (second) to connect these movements with art and literature found in transition… then, more broadly, with work from other magazines, and (third) to highlight the insights these periodicals have to offer when placed in conversation with one another—as they were when originally circulating.
This project would not have been possible without McFarlin Library’s Special Collections or the online database provided by the Modernist Journals Project. transition will be the MJP’s newest addition; if this project has sparked interest in this historic magazine, keep an eye out for the first ten issues that we are digitizing. Highlighting Modernist studies as a burgeoning field of study at TU and an area in which Digital Humanities already has a foundation, “Art in transition” supports and promotes the early stages of a Digital Humanities initiative at the University of Tulsa.
Co-Editor of Art and Design
Stylus Student Journal of Art & Writing
Prose Style/Tone: Informational Copywriting, Proofing
Cover and Layout Designs also by Cailie Golden
Back Cover
Stylus is a journal curated and produced by students at The University of Tulsa. This twenty-first volume features pieces that discuss pain, healing, and memory—topics related to its chosen theme: Scar. Stylus aims to be a launching pad for the university's many talented artists and writers.
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Front Matter
In Recognition:
The name 'Stylus' was contributed by Paul Scheckarski in 2001. We are grateful to Paul for his vital contribution to the publication and to the writing and arts at The University of Tulsa.
With Gratitude:
The cover for the twenty-first edition of this journal was created with the artwork "Memento Mori" by Katherine Karsten.
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This position also required proofreading work, editorial choices like content organization, and layout arrangement. Evidence of my attention to theme and detail can be found in the complete edition, which can be made available upon request during the interview process.
Essay, Literary Analysis
for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf
by Ntozake Shange
Prose Style/Tone: Close Reading, Persuasive, Long-Form
Term Paper Adapted For Masters Thesis
for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf features a collection of voices in place of a single protagonist. Its chorus exchanges stories in conversation; the women speak to one audience on-stage (each other) and another off-stage (the paying public). In this way, Ntozake Shange's choreopoem uses layered language to re-present a demographic that has been distorted by the literary canon and American media culture at large. for colored girls breaks down these stereotypes: society’s tendency to look for patterns in what is unfamiliar. Twentieth and twenty-first century media reflected these mores, depicting black women as “mammies, sapphires, and jezebels, matriarchs…, mistresses,” and antagonists (Cheers 1). This precedent is thriving still, but black dramatists have found ways to either reject or re-present these characters. By implementing a form of black irony that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. calls Signifyin(g), Shange challenges her audience’s habit of filing characters away under existing tropes.
This choreopoem—with its dual medium, layered meanings, and diverse voices—removes the danger of “automatic perception;” it curbs most shortcuts its audience could take in interpreting the work (Shlovsky 2). Hesitation is encouraged: a pause outside the fabric of stories we live in. Shange Signifies on performance as it connotes a personhood that is inescapably public. While poetry often records the interior self, theatre tends to privilege outward presentation. Shange blends the two mediums to re-present black womanhood. Presentations of the matriarch, mistress, and angry black woman create a language of stereotypes denoting blackness and womanhood; to re-present this identity in media, for colored girls opens the stage, expanding its performance beyond what has been projected by an Anglocentric canon...
Artist Spotlight: Constantin Brancusi
“Brancusi’s Influence: Sculpture as a Visual for Modernist Concepts of Form & Originality”
Prose Style/Tone: Essay, Art History, Survey
Term Paper Adapted For Masters Thesis
Certain journals of the early 1900’s circulated new and often subversive ideas—the shift they reflected being perpetuated, in part, by Victorian culture’s collapse and WWI. This form of media is uniquely able to characterize whichever era produced it. While other documents do possess this ability, magazines offer insight through both function and method of distribution. Each journal creates its own cross section of society; a modernist journal could not escape its genre’s dependence on sales and appealed to an audience by asserting the ‘subscription value’ of its subculture, in this way walking the line between popular and counter-cultural interest. The Little Review is an ostensible exception, considering Ezra Pound’s motto: “[m]aking no account with the public taste” (Scholes 13). Editions distributed regularly, responding to other magazines and current events. This intertextual dialogue developed new definitions for art as well as literature.
Constantín Brancusi was one such artist: his name appeared in multiple periodicals. In “Using Brancusi: Three Writers, Three Magazines, Three Versions of Modernism,” Richard N. Masteller says that “debates about [the sculptor] raged in the cafes and bars of Paris” even as journals “reproduced and discussed” his artwork (Masteller 47). The medium of the magazine served as a closer parallel to organic conversation. Editors reviewed his exhibitions, poets found inspiration in his work, and society magazines wrote about his lifestyle. Critics like Pound aired their opinions, but their interpretations served the culture they attempted to shape. Brancusi features in Camera Work, the Little Review, the Dial, The Soil, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, and transition. The treatment of Brancusi’s work in so many magazines speaks to how circulation during this time not only accelerated the evolution of art and literature, but also
allowed for plasticity regarding aesthetic taste. Brancusi, an influenced artist as well as an artistic influence, is one example of how the modernists split from tradition in the name of originality— all while drawing from other cultures or their contemporaries...
1922: Year of the "Graphic Designer"
Archival Research Project
Prose Style/Tone: Informative, Expository, Historical
Completed for "A Year in the Archives: the 1922 Project" organized by Tyler Dick.
Proponents of Modernism often characterized their era as one of change. Long-held standards for the arts invited scrutiny followed by revision; technological advancement and the upheaval caused by two world wars led to an explosion of new “isms,” theories, and manifestos—each offering its own perspective. As short-form media, modernist periodicals circulated these concepts with the speed and consistency that lengthier formats could not afford. Dialogues developed: magazines sustained playful arguments, reviewed artists and authors, or debated the merit of new visual and literary styles. In this period of redefinition, design conventions evolved to suite a burgeoning print culture. The year nineteen twenty-two warrants special attention, because it marks an attempt to gather aspects of literary production under one title: graphic design.
In nineteen twenty-two, William Allison Dwiggins coined the term “graphic designer” in his essay “New Kind of Printing Calls for New Design” (Doordan 29). The treatise cites technological progress as something to capitalize on; although Dwiggins did not subscribe to any singular movement, he saw a need to synthesize the old guard of ‘fine printing’ with novel techniques. Tension between those who saw automation as a decline in quality and those who saw in it a chance to innovate prevented neither Dwiggins, nor other designers, from combining past traditions with modern trends. Progress generated new typefaces, visual styles, and concepts like Bauhaus or Gestalt theory. Because all literary magazines of the nineteen-twenties held varying views on the future of design, their covers and layouts also differ...
