Imagine President Obama and your first love are making a height chart while a group of boys stand idly nearby. You're in your red polka-dot bathing suit and want to join in. Their project has a "boys only" feel, but that doesn't matter. It's finally your turn for show-and-tell and you have a scene from the movie Ghost that everyone loves -- except nobody pays attention. After all, President Obama is in the room.

Although it sounds like a scene from an alternate reality, what just transpired is actually from the mind of Zulema Renee Summerfield, winner of the SF State creative writing department's 2010 Michael Rubin Book Award.

Her run-in with the president is just one of the dreams described in "everything faces all ways at once," a collection of short fiction by Summerfield.

"I've written my dreams for years, years and years," said Summerfield, 31. "My dream life is kind of my parallel life ... and for that, the reason I love to sleep. I just think the unconscious mind is fascinating."

Summerfield, who graduated from SF State in spring 2010 with an MFA in fiction writing, celebrated the release of her fiction collection at Space Gallery in downtown San Francisco on Thursday, Nov. 8 before a small crowd of her peers, admirers and publishers.

"Now is my one chance in my whole life to say something to Barack Obama and that's the sort of thing you can't pass up because you're an asshole if you pass that up," Summerfield said as she shared an excerpt from one of her dreams. "Not an asshole to the world, just an asshole to yourself, which is the worst kind of asshole to be if you think about it."

Summerfield's book release party was the product of Fourteen Hills, an SF State literary magazine published biannually by the creative writing department. Each year, Fourteen Hills awards one student manuscript the MRBA, publishes 500 copies of the winning work and hosts a release party to celebrate the winner.

"I had classes with other people that submitted and I knew the quality of work that was submitted," Summerfield said. "When I first found out, I was really excited and really floored."

For 16 years, students from every major at SF State have submitted their manuscripts to the magazine in the hope of winning the creative writing department's highest award and becoming published authors in the process.

"It's supposed to help unpublished writers get their foot in the door," said Lauri Savageau, fiction co-editor of Fourteen Hills. "And it's the whole school, so competition is fierce."

The submitted manuscripts are judged by an outside writer who is not affiliated with the creative writing department.

This year's judge was Terese Svoboda, an author whose work has been featured in the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, Spin Magazine and the Paris Review.

"(Summerfield) has more of a unique, eclectic style of writing," Savageau said. "She approaches things from a very unexpected angle and I was unsurprised she won. It will be interesting to see where this book goes."

On the night of the event, Summerfield sold more than 70 copies of her collection. The funding for the release party and publishing of Summerfield's manuscript comes from donations and sales of the previous books.

The release party filled the small gallery and featured readings by past MRBA winner D.W. Lichtenberg and Peter Orner, a novelist, creative writing professor at SF State and minor character in Summerfield's book.

"She was one of my most original students," Orner said. "It's very flattering (to be a character). I'm honored."

Although blurbs -- quotes from reviewers that describe the work and catch the reader's attention -- aren't unususal in books, Summerfield took a unique approach when "blurbing" her book.

"'everything faces all ways at once' is a gripping, powerfully cathartic, near-perfect work of art," an accolade the author attributed to God.

"You have to get people to blurb your book," Summerfield said. "They asked me to get someone I know, but I really wanted the blurb to be Yoko Ono or God and they loved that idea."

Summerfield plastered pictures of her throughout the party. She made a plea to anyone who might have connections to the famous artist while wearing a shirt with "Yoko Ono called me," scribbled on it.

Although she has yet to receive word from Ono, Summerfield told the audience the process of getting her book published was a wonderful one.

"Lately, the whole world is a hand and it's pressing on my heart," Summerfield said after thanking her many supporters.