Swati Rana is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she directs the American Cultures & Global Contexts Center. She is the author of Race Characters: Ethnic Literature and the Figure of the American Dream. Her literary criticism has appeared in American Literature, American Literary History, and the Journal of Asian American Studies. Her creative writing has appeared in diaCRITICS, The Paris Review, Granta, Crazyhorse, Asian American Literary Review, Wasafiri, and elsewhere. Her work has received support from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Swati teaches undergraduate courses on Asian American literature and culture, comparative ethnic literatures, the creative imagination of racial justice, and creative writing. Her graduate courses examine new paradigms in Asian American and comparative ethnic literary studies as well as articulations of race and form within postcolonial and transnational frameworks. She received a B.A. in English at Dartmouth College and a Ph.D. in English at the University of California, Berkeley, where she also received a M.A. in Creative Writing.