A poetry thesis submitted to the Program in Creative Writing in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts in English.

Damned to Marriage by Violet Prete Staged reading production will be on 7pm, May 10th at Kerr Studio

A new play about Mary who uses artificial intelligence to go back in time to when her parents met and dated at Williams College in 1975 to retell the experience of the story of two lovers meeting while at school and how their marriage eventually fails. She breaks them up and urges them not to have kids. It is a story of young love through the eyes of a time travel dream scheme that is fueled by artificial intelligence.

This collection of poems writes into history my family's own story, one centered around the coming together of my Korean-Lithuanian background and the lessons of love that I have derived from those who came before me.

"Narrative as Needle and Thread" examines how Frederick Douglass's three autobiographies—Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881 and revised in 1892)—function as a form of psychological healing from trauma. Drawing on trauma theory, it is argued that Douglass's autobiographical revisions represent not merely literary refinement but a deliberate strategy for processing trauma that parallels modern therapeutic approaches. Douglass's narrative control developed alongside his growing social and political autonomy. Through close analysis of key traumatic episodes, Douglass, to a certain extent, transforms traumatic memory into integrated narrative memory across his autobiographical revisions. Rather than viewing recovery as requiring complete narrative closure, it is argued that Douglass's work exemplifies how healing from historical trauma involves sustaining productive tension between remembering and forgetting, integration and resistance, personal healing, and collective witness.