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 (UNC Press, 2020). Her literary criticism has appeared in American Literature, American Literary History, and the Journal of Asian American Studies. Her creative writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, diaCRITICS, The Paris Review, Granta, swamp pink, Asian American Literary Review, Wasafiri, The Dalhousie Review, and Berkeley Poetry Review, among other journals, and has been anthologized in Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry and They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets.

She is the winner of the 2023 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize in Poetry. Her work has received support from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and has been recognized by Academy of American Poets and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) literary prizes.

Swati teaches undergraduate courses on Asian American literature and culture, comparative ethnic literatures, the creative imagination of racial justice, creative writing, ethnic autobiography, and myths of model minority. 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 was born in India and has lived in Canada and the United States. 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.