2025 Portz Scholar Award Recipient

Abstract

This project explores the intersection of Young Adult (YA) fiction and the romance genre through an original YA romance novel titled Apricity. The novel follows protagonist RileyKitridge, a foster youth navigating trauma, love, the complexity personal growth. By incorporating essential elements of romance with the emotional realism of YA. Apricity creates anauthentic narrative grounded in resilience and human connection. Research on YA foster care narratives and memoirs, YA literature, and child welfare informed the novel’s portrayalof accurate systemic challenges and emotional struggles. This creative project combines literary analysis with storytelling to demonstrate the ability of YA romance to voice underrepresented experiences.

Why this research is important to me:

I've always enjoyed writing, which is why I took classes in Creative and Nonfiction writing as an undergraduate at EKU. I like developing characters, getting to know them and trying to gauge how they react to situations. It's a personal thing, writing; there's vulnerability in it. There's also vulnerability in the stories we chose to tell.

This thesis has been important to me because it gave me the opportunity to tell the kind of story I wanted through my own novel, allowed me to explore what it means to carry trauma while trying to move forward, what it means to build trust when it’s always been broken, and how complicated, and healing, human connection can be. I wanted to create space for a reality often overlooked in narratives, to treat it with the care it deserved. Apricity, apart from being a creative thesis project, examines the emotional honesty of YA fiction, the underestimated depth of romance, and the realities of growing up in or around systems that don’t always offer softness or safety. I'm proud of what this project became, and incredibly grateful for those who supported it and me along the way.