[1] MEANING MACHINE.

Each member of the Thurston family is going through a unique and largely private hell in the wake of family tragedy, and they find that their coping strategies are far from compatible: Evie, Charlie's sister, takes on her dead brother's legacy, adopting his mannerisms and completing his college degree, even finding a girlfriend just like the girl who died with him in the crash. Lily, Charlie's mother, develops a robust relationship with her son's ghost, finding that the dead Charlie is preferable company to her distant husband and two surviving children. Richard, Charlie's father, employs strategies he uses in his work as a management consultant to tackle the problem of his son's death, and April, Charlie's youngest sister, struggles to navigate her rocky adolescence with little support from a family who can't see the living for the dead. Can they find their way back to each other?

[2] BAD INFLUENCE.

Against a backdrop of immanent environmental collapse, two professional thieves become unwittingly embroiled in a plot to save a cabal of ultra-wealthy patrons setting up a global supply chain so they (and only they) can survive at a compound in Antarctica when "the extinction event" occurs, with some underclass workers to do manual labor. This sits uneasily with Marco and Mariah, though Graci, their employer, has promised them a place in the new society. But along the way, they uncover more of the plot and finally need to reckon with the fact that their place in this new society is not anything like what they were sold…

[3] HOW ARGUMENTS WORK: A GUIDE TO WRITING AND ANALYZING TEXTS IN COLLEGE.

The rising cost of college tuition and textbooks in the United States has sparked an effort to create free content for college students. In 2021, I collaborated with a group of other English instructors around the state of California to develop an open-source OER textbook called How Arguments Work, released on LibreTexts in September 2021. It can be accessed here. The project was headed by Anna Mills and is free to use and fully integratable into various online classrooms such as Canvas. From the front matter: “How Arguments Work takes students through the techniques they will need to respond to readings and make sophisticated arguments in any college class. This is a practical guide to argumentation with strategies and templates for the kinds of assignments students will commonly encounter. It covers rhetorical concepts in everyday language and explores how arguments can build trust and move readers.” The book is now being used at 30 and climbing colleges around the United States and abroad.