Join Ruby authors Susanna Kwan (Awake in the Floating City, Pantheon Books) and Mia Ayumi Malhotra (Mothersalt, Alice James Books) for a reading in celebration of their new books, both released on May 13, 2025. 

Kwan’s debut novel imagines a future flooded San Francisco that, according to Meng Jin, “expands the known world, making room within its unbearable devastation for beauty, compassion, and love,” while Mothersalt, Malhotra’s second collection of poetry, “charts—astoundingly, wondrously—the vast territories of the unnarratable that constitute motherhood” (Jenny Xie). Both works, written side by side at The Ruby beginning in 2018, explore what it means to exist in a world unmoored from its bearings—bewildered, disbelieving, and yet fully awakened to what it means to be human. 

Following the reading, writer, producer, and oral historian Shanna Farrell will moderate a conversation between the two authors about caregiving and connection, imagined/disappearing worlds, creative community, and more.

Susanna Kwan is an artist and writer from San Francisco. Her work has been supported by fellowships from Kundiman, Storyknife, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, The Writers' Grotto, and Vanderbilt University. Awake in the Floating City is her first novel. She teaches writing with The Dream Side.

Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Mothersalt, the chapbook Notes from the Birth Year, and Isako Isako, a California Book Award finalist and winner of the Alice James Award, Nautilus Gold Award for Poetry, National Indie Excellence Award, and Maine Literary Award. Her work has received the Hawker Prize for Southeast Asian Poetry and the Singapore Poetry Prize, and she is a Kundiman Fellow and founding member of The Ruby SF. Currently she teaches poetry at Left Margin LIT and is working on a new book about music and the interior life.

Shanna Farrell is an interviewer at UC Berkeley's Oral History Center, where she works on a wide variety of projects and specializes in arts and cultural, food and beverage, and environmental history. She is the author of A Good Drink: In Pursuit of Sustainable Spirits and Bay Area Cocktails: A History of Culture, Community and Craft. She is currently working on a book about fertility.