Dickson Lam earned an MFA degree in fiction from Rutgers-Newark University and is also a graduate of UC Berkeley and Columbia University. He has taught in small schools in New York, Oakland, and San Francisco and was a founding teacher at June Jordan School for Equity.  He is currently a nonfiction MFA candidate at the University of Houston, where he is working on a memoir about growing up with an absent father and struggling with his identity as an Asian American in a public housing project in San Francisco.