Melissa Crisan: "Blackout" is a collection of poetry on abuse, mental health, suicide, and coping with the chaos both outside and within. It is framed around blackout poetry, which involves taking outside documents and covering certain words to turn it into something new. Using old notes, journal entries, and even an old suicide note, this work aims to take the parts of life that people want desperately to hide and find beauty within the pain. Mistakes should never be blacked out, but instead embraced as life's greatest source of empathy.
Noah Gore: When an orphaned girl and her younger brother learn that their mother may still be alive, they set out on a grand adventure to find her. Follow Nora (a thief), Tobias (a wizard-in-training), and their friend Flint (a sorcerer) as they travel throughout the Five-Nations of Dekko in search for what remains of their family.
This screenplay acts as a pilot to the entire series. Each episode’s runtime is roughly the same as a full-length film (80 to 95 minutes).
Kourtney Kisling: “The Shadow, Not the Tree” is a collection of 22 poems that speaks to the poet's very real experience living with major depressive disorder and suicidal ideation. The poems follow the speaker’s journey through pain, loss, heartbreak, the long, winding road to recovery and self growth, and finding happiness.
Erin McElligott: Piper and her parents are moving. They've been wanting to get out of the city, and into a place where it's quiet and secluded. Her father finds a property in northeastern Ohio and snatches it up quickly. On their way to their new home, they come across a black cat with peculiar eyes. The cat is not actually a cat, but an entity sent by Fate herself to prevent Piper from going down the wrong path of fate: becoming a demon. As the entity begins to help Piper, they realize that her case is much like another one. Thirty years ago, they helped Wren, who not only lived in the same town, but also the same house. While recounting Wren's story alongside Piper's, the entity discovers new things they hadn't noticed before. The entity determines that the connections between the two girls are not a coincidence and that something even darker is trying desperately to get Piper to go down the wrong path, and the entity will do everything they can to stop it.
The working title for now is "The Paths of Fate" but it is very likely to change.
Kathleen McKay: "Oh, To Bloom, To Burn" is a narrative poetry collection formatted as if it were an ongoing stage play. The collection tells the story of the narrator reflecting on how they fell in and out of love with two lovers: Her, a childhood friend who could not return their affection in a meaningful way, and Him a toxic rebound they just couldn’t get away from. She was flowers, He was fire, and in the end, they want nothing but to leave them both behind and find themselves again.
Jackson Schultz: I examine God, sin, humanity, and their interactions with one another through the lenses of three characters, all subjected to grievances following a slew of human rights violations. The characters are removed from the Earth they knew, stripped of their identities, and forced to ask themselves what still matters to them. The story progresses in three parts, beginning on a fallen Earth, then on Mercury, colonized in secret, and ending on Mars, where the general populace lives slavishly.
Melan White: My capstone is a cross-genre project that takes a creative approach to examining intersectionality (the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual). By exploring the way in which all parts of my identity overlap and present in different situations, the project has become something of a therapeutic personal narrative about what it means to be a black, queer woman in spaces that aren't comfortable with my identity markers.
