A collaboration with the Kearny Street Workshop's 2025 cohort of their Interdisciplinary Writers Lab, a three-month multigenre class led by instructors erica lewis, Meng Jin, and Amanda Machado.
Featuring:
Lynse Cooper
Sam Javellana Hill
Nisa Khan
Karla Myn Khine
Ashley Sojin Kim
Maggie Lam
Isabel Li
Elise Liu
Christine Xuan Phan
Alyson Sagala
Danielle Shi
Eden Julia Sugay
Cover Image by Lynse Cooper
Cover Design by Sam Javellana Hill
Kelly Wang (b. 1966) resides in Southern California. She was born in Gansu Province, China and attended university in Dalian, China, before relocating to Irvine, California, where she lived and wrote for many years. Her longstanding interests in spirituality and philosophy inform the compositions in Silent Heart, her first volume of published poetry in Chinese and English.
Cover Image by Danielle Shi
Cover Design by Justin Carder of Bathers Library
We did a special release of pandopticon 【熊猫之眼】 (Doll Hair, 2025) at Winslow House Project‘s open house, where Danielle created the interactive zine as an artist-in-residence in April.
pandopticon currently remains a limited edition release courtesy of Winslow House Project in Vallejo, CA. The project is funded through a residency stipend from the Prelinger Library in San Francisco, where initial research for the zine was conducted in March.
pandopticon is an exploration of surveillance — perception — image, focalized through the experiences of vulnerable pandas Fei Fei, Jin Dudu, and An An. We issued 60 copies for our first run, distributing 45 to guests and mailing out the remainder to family and close friends. Each zine is bound in jute twine and comes with a story within a story, one of five love letters narrated by Jin Dudu to An An, allowing readers to swap and collect the individual vellum paper inserts. The lettering on the cover is hand-written, applying Chinese inkstone and brush technique to recontextualize the role of Chinese calligraphy within a postmodern landscape.
A panda Halloween in the genre of Chinese horror.
A collaboration with SF Chinatown’s local printer Duxwell Printing and tabled with the Chinese Culture Center, Osmanthus Nocturne No. 4 【桂香夜曲第四】 is a Chinese horror tribute to the vulnerable diplomatic pandas of the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in Sichuan, China.
With a foreword by Tim Tran, the apparently tongue-in-cheek story takes a closer examination of the nebulous international art world, couching its criticisms in a larger argument about the primacy of the surveillance state both at home and abroad, and its overt influence on how ideas are exchanged.
The series CHINESE KOMBUCHAS consists of chapbooks Unsaid, Petrichor, and No Pouting.
No Pouting
A selection of two short stories, "Lures" and "Sweetie", about coming-of-age in a predominately Asian American suburb, through photography-as-muse and tragicomic boba shop beginnings. Complete with 135mm film photographs of fashion, play, and feminisms.
(36 pages, color)
The series CHINESE KOMBUCHAS consists of chapbooks Unsaid, Petrichor, and No Pouting.
Petrichor
First published as a short story in UK magazine La Piccioletta Barca, Petrichor pulls at a family's ties in the face of a devastating illness that redounds throughout their kinship structure. The hybrid narrative juxtaposes Western art from the National Gallery of Art with 135mm film photographs of contemporary China—gesturing toward a universal humanity shared by the ailing and the well, while encouraging us to find our supportive role in the mental health discourse of our communities.
(40 pages, color)
The series CHINESE KOMBUCHAS consists of chapbooks Unsaid, Petrichor, and No Pouting.
Unsaid
Two short stories, "Younger" and "Halcyon", counter-narrate the limiting stereotype of the model minority myth. Unsaid utilizes filmic metaphors to expand creative imagination around the reclamation of self-representation and authorship.
"Halcyon" was featured in a reading at the Kearny Street Workshop's APAture: RETURN Literary Arts event in October 2024, and was selected as Runner-Up (Honorable Mention) by Lucy Ives for the Gulf Coast Barthelme Prize for Short Fiction in 2025.
(40 pages, color)