“Every day is a reenactment of the creation story. We emerge from dense unspeakable material, through the shimmering power of dreaming stuff.”

—Joy Harjo, “A Postcolonial Tale”

The Dream Side is...

Andria Lo

MENG JIN is the author of the novel Little Gods and the short story collection Self-Portrait with Ghost. Her short fiction has been anthologized in the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prizes, and her books have been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner, PEN/Open Book Award, NYPL Young Lions Prize, and the LATimes First Fiction Prize. She is currently writing a fake memoir, for which she received a 2021 Creative Capital Award. She has over ten years of creative writing and literature teaching experience, from community classes to MFA programs, and most recently as a Visiting Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard University.

Meng is drawn to fiction with surprising, elegant shapes and stylish, direct sentences. She is an omnivorous reader, with tastes ranging from the documentary novels of Annie Ernaux to the fantastical worlds of Octavia Butler, an ardent admirer of poetry and a follower of Ursula K Le Guin’s “clear, clean line.” Unfortunately for her writing, she loves writing about writing (metafictions, art criticism and ars poetica, translation theory, etc). However this is fortunate for her teaching; she is often thinking about why and how we write.

Andria Lo

RACHEL KHONG is the author of the novels Real Americans, a New York Times bestseller, and Goodbye, Vitamin, winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction. From 2011 to 2016, she was an editor of Lucky Peach, a quarterly magazine of food and culture. In 2018, Rachel founded The Ruby, a work and event space for writers and artists in San Francisco’s Mission District. Her story collection, My Dear You, will be published by Knopf in April 2026. Rachel has taught undergraduate creative writing at the University of Florida, as well as a variety of online courses for adult students. Since 2021, she has mentored emerging writers with the Periplus Mentorship Collective.

Rachel is interested in the imaginative impulse that brings to being what has never existed before: whether a home-cooked meal or piece of fiction. Imagination isn’t reserved for fiction: it shapes our realities, and ultimately our world. She believes it’s imperative to practice it—ideally together. She brings her experience in space- and community-building to The Dream Side. She’s fascinated by the often contradictory foundations of art: surrender and discipline, pleasure and devotion, the mystical and practical, solitude and community. She hopes to assist students in finding and practicing their unique gifts, and fulfilling their creative potential.

Andria Lo

SUSANNA KWAN is the author of the novel Awake in the Floating City. Her work has been supported by Storyknife, Kundiman, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and the Center for Cultural Innovation. She has taught at Vanderbilt University and the Tennessee Department of Correction Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center (formerly the Tennessee Prison for Women). She lives in San Francisco.

Susanna is drawn to the connections between forms: words in a sentence, people in a city, water and land. Relationships are sites teeming with history, tension, possibility, and shape—all of which she sees as essential and thrilling elements of a written work. She’s also interested in creativity as a shifting practice of engaging with the shifting world. In her teaching, she hopes to help students cultivate their attention to that unstable world, explore interconnectedness, and move toward mystery.

Abe Bingham

SHRUTI SWAMY is the author of the story collection A House Is a Body, and a novel, The Archer. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Elizabeth George Foundation, the San Francisco Arts Council, and Vassar College, and is a 2024 Rome Prize Fellow in Literature. Shruti’s work has appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney's, The Believer, and the New York Times, and twice won the O. Henry. Her introduction to Ursula K Le Guin’s masterpiece Always Coming Home appears in the novel’s 2023 reissue. Shruti has taught creative writing at San Francisco State and California College for the Arts, as well as with Tin House, conferences, and community spaces like the Ruby.

As a writer and a teacher, Shruti is interested in exploring the edge between dream and reality—the world of the unconscious brought into the conscious world of language. In her own work, that’s led her to thinking about non-linear forms of storytelling. She is currently years into exploring the possibilities of the spiral as a literary form. Shruti’s background in yoga and meditation has also sparked an interest in writing as both a physical and a spiritual practice, explored through workshops that draw from the lived experience of the body.