Hi Kevin,
Thank you for responding. I tried gffread but didn't have any luck for some unknown reason. I built an index of my genome with Samtools and made sure that the index was in the same directory as my genome (I used the -g flag) and full path to the genome as well as the gff file, but I received "No fasta index found for...", so Cufflinks (v2.2.1) built me a new index and continued on with the program, however, the output file was completely empty, so I am unsure what went wrong. Moreover, I compared the index I generated with Samtools relative to the Cufflinks index and they were essentially identical.
I am confident that my code is correct (because I'm able to at least generate an empty fasta). Could the format of the gff file not be compatible with the genome fasta? My data is from NCBI, but it is of a recently published paper in Nature, so I'm unsure why there would be any discrepancies.