Freedom is a Good Book and a Sugar High

This is a creative nonfiction piece about reading literature with an inmate

Deadeye

Book 3 of the Luce Hansen Thriller series. Special Agent Luce Hansen’s Thanksgiving vacation with her new lover, forensic pathologist Harper Bennett, is cut short when she’s tasked with recapturing Deadeye, a vicious serial predator who has escaped custody. The timing couldn’t be worse, especially when Bennett seems to be struggling with the realities of Hansen’s work and questioning whether she’s willing to risk building a life with a woman who puts work first, even when the job puts her in the line of fire. Hansen can’t put aside the chase even with her relationship on shaky ground. On the anniversary of Deadeye’s first kill, two brothers are shot while jogging along a quiet country road. Before Deadeye can claim another victim, Hansen and her team must track a killer who has proven to be an expert at hiding in plain sight. The stakes, both professional and personal, get even higher when Hansen is cut off from her team in rural Ohio and must fight for her very survival. As Bennett frantically searches for clues to Hansen’s disappearance, Deadeye’s hunt draws ever closer to home.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/books/1088/thumbnail.jp

This I Believe: The Do-Over

I believe in second chances. Even thirds. There’s nothing like the power of a sincere do-over. As a junior and senior high student, school was never my forte. It wasn’t for lack of effort on my parents’ part—my mother had been a fourth grade teacher and my father, a doctor, worked hard to keep me in one of the best districts in our area. Still, I bucked most school activities. Study groups? No way. Extra-curriculars? Not unless my friends were doing it. Math club? Please! My junior year I fell into an anxious depression so severe, I required hospitalization. All I wanted was to sleep but my racing mind didn’t allow for rest. My kaleidoscope eyes—that’s what I called it—the ever-churning landscape before me that moved so quickly, I never had a clear focus on anything. The result? Everything of an equal, blurry confusion. I was as confounded about what to watch on television as I was about how to approach a biology quiz. Doctors warned my parents not to expect much: “You’ll be lucky if she graduates from high school.” The dark waters of depression eddied around me, rising higher and higher until I could barely keep my head above water. Exhaustion overwhelmed me from my violent tread that led nowhere fast. It only took a moment’s kindness to help turn things around. A staff member found a book for me somewhere on the unit: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

Forsaken Trust

Book 2 in the Luce Hansen Thriller series. Third book forthcoming. Description from the publisher: Wallace Lake, Ohio, takes care of their own. Unwelcoming of outsiders, the community closes ranks when four women are found murdered along the water’s edge. Agent Luce Hansen of the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation must find a way in before another woman loses her life to the ruthless serial killer. With the help of her new team—a hot rookie and a smart, beautiful medical examiner—Luce uncovers a ring of devotion surrounding the prime suspect. As Luce works to unearth the dark secrets of this close-knit town, she learns to what extraordinary lengths people will go to protect the ones they love. And when Luce feels forsaken, both professionally and personally, she must regain trust in her most valuable investigative tool: herself

Well-Worn

Technically it\u27s not a bookshelf, but a collection of paperbacks stacked beside my nightstand. Most second-hand booksellers would term the current state of these paperbacks as well-worn. Multiple pages of these works are dog-eared, while the margins are filled with my scribbled thoughts and connections. The covers are permanently bent, torn, and haphazardly mended after so many harried shoves inside my cluttered book-bag. When I think of this book collection, I’m reminded of how my favorite music looked before the invention of the Ipod. My beloved tapes and CDs had been played so much, most of the printed material had rubbed off. Littered with cracks and scratches, it wasn’t hard to tell which tapes or CDs were a favorite at any given time. For me, well-worn equals well-loved. I like to think of this corner heap of literature as a greatest hits hoard similar to one of the multitudes of playlists on my IPod. Always in flux, the collection grows and diminishes with different works. I have rigid rules for inclusion, though. Without these strict guidelines the pile would quickly grow beyond my ceiling or spill onto the nightstand, which is solely reserved for current books I’m in the process of consuming

Branded Cowboy

“Here is a moving story of a transgender man whose roots reach deeply into the dust of West Texas. He must choose between the woman he loves and the life he has made on his family’s ranch as a cowboy. I was impressed with how the writer chose to tell this story, with grace and nuance and heart. – Roxane Ga

For All the Mias of this World

Over the past few years there has been a lot of attention given to the amount of women, or lack thereof, in the publishing world. Statistics provided by the 2013 Vida Count show that not only should those numbers be much stronger, but so should the representations of women and their variations of sexuality in published works. Roxane Gay writes in the introduction to her 2014 book, Bad Feminist: Essays, “Movies, more often than not, tell the stories of men as if men’s stories are the only stories that matter. When women are involved, they are the sidekicks, the romantic interests, the afterthoughts. Rarely do women get to be the center of attention. Rarely do our stories get to matter.” When we add lesbian to a female’s story, we find ourselves once again at the main point of my fellow reader: women are marginalized in this world. Lesbians are doubly marginalized

South Carolina, 2012

South Carolina, 2012 began with a writing prompt from NPR’s Three-Minute Fiction contest. I assigned it to my students and joined them in the writing challenge. The piece soon turned into a nonfiction flash about my father. I’d recently spent two weeks at my father’s home where I came to understand the gravity of his early onset Alzheimer’s. I’d been in denial about the severity of my father’s diagnosis, and instances like the ones described in the flash brought me face-to-face with a disease I was completely unprepared to deal with. My father passed away in the Spring of 2014

Crossed

Book 1 in the Luce Hansen thriller series. Description from the publisher: Agent Luce Hansen returns home to Willow’s Ridge to catch a serial killer who has been murdering young women. It’s the case she’s been waiting for, the case that compels her to return to the small town she turned her back on nineteen years ago, the case she plans to ride from the Ohio BCI all the way to the FBI. The case worth risking her shaky relationship with her lover, Rowan. But the horrors of the case recall the unsolved murder of Luce’s first girlfriend, and Luce is forced to confront the local ex-gay ministry that haunted her youth. When the past crosses the present, will Luce lose everything she’s worked so hard to build

Specificity and mechanism of microRNAs in the regulation of gene expression

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Biology, 2005.Vita.Includes bibliographical references.Originally thought of as a molecular inferior to its nucleic acid cousin DNA, RNA has more recently been appreciated as an equal partner in biology, a molecule at the heart of many crucial cellular reactions and perhaps the first molecule of life itself. The discovery of RNA interference (RNAi) has further emphasized the importance of RNA-based processes in the regulation of gene expression. One arm of the RNAi response uses a large class of endogenous, small RNA species termed microRNAs (miRNAs). The establishment of a mammalian tissue culture system has allowed for investigation of both the mechanism and specificity of miRNA-directed translational repression. The term RNAi can be used to encompass a wide variety of gene silencing phenomena. The canonical RNAi pathway, as first described by Fire and colleagues in C. elegans and studied biochemically in Drosophila by Tuschl, Zamore, and colleagues, is a post-transcriptional mechanism of gene silencing, in which short, interfering RNAs (siRNAs) guide the cleavage of complementary mRNAs. Endogenous miRNAs are similar to siRNAs, and the two pathways, siRNA-directed mRNA cleavage and miRNA-directed translational repression, share common protein components yet lead to different outcomes. Our results indicate that the distinct outcome of these pathways is largely determined by the interaction of the small RNA species with its mRNA target. Additionally, variation in the number of miRNA binding sites shows that miRNAs can act synergistically to enhance repression activity.(cont.) Further experimentation into the specificity of miRNAs revealed that the miRNA does not simply basepair to its target mRNA but rather that regions of the miRNA contribute differently to translational repression activity. The 5' region of the miRNA, the first -8 nucleotides, is necessary and sufficient for target recognition. The 3' region can contribute significantly to activity, however, in cases where the 5' region has less-than-optimal complementarity. Multiple miRNAs can regulate a single mRNA, and the degree of translational repression is dependent on the expression level of both the miRNA and the mRNA. These results indicate that miRNAs are capable of regulating a substantial percentage of the genome and thus are integral factors in the control of gene expression. Finally, the observation that miRNAs can direct mRNA cleavage, albeit inefficiently, offers promise for finding endogenous miRNA targets and understanding the scope of miRNA-directed regulation of gene expression.by John Gerard Doench.Ph.D