Past Fellows

View all Steinbeck Fellows for each year going all the way back to 2001.

• 2023-2024

  • A.J. Bermudez is the author of Stories No One Hopes Are About Them, Winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award and current Lambda Literary Award Finalist. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s, Chicago Quarterly Review, Story, Boulevard, Creative Nonfiction, Electric Literature, The Masters Review, Columbia Journal, Chicago Review, The Offing, Baltimore Review, Epiphany, LitHub, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the Diverse Voices Award, the PAGE Award, and the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize. She currently serves as Editor of The Maine Review. Her work gravitates toward contemporary explorations of power, privilege, and place. 

    Francisco González is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and a two-time winner of the O. Henry Prize. His fiction appears in Gulf Coast, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Southern Review, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from Columbia University.

    Alexia Nader is a writer based in San Francisco. Her fiction has been published in Your Impossible Voice, her poetry in Obsidian, and her criticism in Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, and Guernica, among other outlets. She received her MA in Journalism from New York University, where she was a Dean's Fellow, and her MFA in Fiction from the University of San Francisco, where she held a post-graduate teaching fellowship. She is currently working on her first novel. 

    Itto Outini is an author, book coach, MacDowell Fellow, and Fulbright Scholar. She holds an MA
    in journalism and strategic media, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The North
    American Review, The Fulbright Chronicle, The Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere, and she’s
    spoken for organizations including Cal Tech University, Verizon Wireless, The International Trade Centre, and The United Nations. In partnership with her husband Mekiya, Itto founded
    The DateKeepers, a full-service author support platform dedicated to elevating writers and creators around the globe. Itto’s husband and co-author, Mekiya Outini, is also a MacDowell Fellow (2024) and holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Arkansas. His short story “Baptism by Earth” won the 55th New Millennium Award in Fiction, and his work has appeared in Chautauqua, The Coachella Review, Willow Springs, and elsewhere. The first two chapters of his novel, Ashes, Ashes, have been featured in the West Trade Review.

    Itto and Mekiya Outini are the founding editors of The DateKeepers, an international media platform dedicated to telling untold stories and spotlighting well-lived lives. To learn more about the Outinis and their work, visit their website at thedatekeepers.com.

    Amanda Rizkalla is a writer from Los Angeles, California. Her work appears in Boston Review, No Tokens Journal, and The Fabulist, among several other publications. A graduate of Stanford University, she has received fellowships and support from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and Blue Mountain Center. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and was selected as a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship and the Outpost Residency. She received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was awarded the Kemper K. Knapp Graduate Fellowship. 

    Xueyou Wang is a writer living in Los Angeles, California. Her work focuses on immigrant women's experiences and transnational, transcultural stories. She is particularly interested in the intersection between Asian diaspora and Latin American cultures. Born in China and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, Xueyou graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California and a Master of Arts in Women's and Gender Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her work has appeared in Discover Nikkei and is forthcoming in The Margins. She is working on a collection of short stories. 

• 2022-2023

  • Vivan Ewing is a writer and journalist from Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts and an MFA candidate in Fiction at the University of Oregon. She has reported for The New York Times and her fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from Teeth Magazine, Papersafe Magazine and elsewhere. Vivian's work has received support from Mary Sky, the Andy Warhol Foundation and the Community of Writers Conference at Squaw Valley. She is currently writing a novel about motherhood.
    
    

    Amanda Mei Kim writes about the way that cultural power, racism, nature, and capitalism weave through the lives of rural Californians of color. She is the recipient of the Marion Weber Healing Arts Fellowship, the California Arts Council Emerging Artist Fellowship, and the Phelan Award. She has completed residencies at Mesa Refuge, Yefe Nof, Hedgebrook, and the Fine Arts Work Center. Her work has appeared in Brick, LitHub, and PANK, and is forthcoming in an anthology of BIPOC women writers. Her professional work focuses on equity, agriculture, and narrative. She is writing a memoir about growing up on a tenant farm in California.
    
    
    Meghana Mysore, from Portland, Oregon, holds a B.A. in English from Yale University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Hollins University. Her writing has been or will be published in The Yale Review, The Rumpus, Indiana Review, Passages North, the Asian American Writers' Workshop, Roxane Gay's The Audacity, and the anthology A World Out of Reach (Yale University Press). Mysore is the recipient of fellowships and support from Bread Loaf, Tin House, and the Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, where she won the second-place prize in prose in their annual contest. She is at work on a novel exploring loss, desire, and joy in three generations of an Indian American family, an excerpt of which is forthcoming from Pleiades.
    
    

    Bobuq Sayed is a queer Afghan-Australian writer with an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Miami, where they were a James A. Michener Fellow. They have received fellowships from the Lambda Literary retreat, Tin House, Kundiman, and VONA/Voices, and their writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Guernica, The Drift, New Australian Fiction 2022, Gulf Coast, Collisions: Fictions of the Future, Meanjin, and The Rumpus. They are the co-editor of an anthology called Nothing to Hide: Voices from Trans and Gender Diverse Australia in addition to completing a novel about queer and trans exiles living in Istanbul, Turkey.
    
    

    Reena Shah has been selected as a Tin House Scholar, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellow, Crossfields Fellow at Cuttyhunk, and a Fulbright scholar. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Waxwing Magazine, Midnight Breakfast, BBC, Joyland Magazine, The Guardian, National Geographic, The American Prospect, Third Coast, Writer’s Digest, The Texas Review, Chalkbeat, and DNA India among others. Shah was the winner of the 2019 Third Coast Fiction prize and the 2019 Writer’s Digest Short Short Story Award.
    
    
    

    Annie Vy Trinh holds an MFA from the University of Kansas and an M.A from Mississippi State University. Her fiction has appeared in New Ohio Review, Joyland, Passages North, and several other venues as well as earned a Pushcart nomination and was selected as a finalist for a Best of the Net award in non-fiction. She has been supported by Kundiman, VONA, and Key West Literary Seminar. Trinh’s work centers on the Vietnamese Diaspora and is completing a short story collection.

• 2021-2022

  • Ariel Chu is a Taiwanese American writer from Eastvale, California and a first-year student in USC’s Creative Writing and Literature PhD program. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing at Syracuse University, where she received the Shirley Jackson Prize in Fiction. A former Editor-in-Chief of Salt Hill Journal, a 2019 P.D. Soros Fellow, and a 2020 Luce Scholar in Taipei, Ariel has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Best Small Fictions Anthology, and the Best of the Net Award. Her writing can be found in Black Warrior Review, The Rumpus, and The Common, among others. Ariel is currently working on a short story collection and novel. 
    
    

    Rose Himber Howse is a queer writer from North Carolina and a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she served as fiction editor of The Greensboro Review. Rose’s fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Joyland, The Carolina Quarterly, Hobart, YES! Magazine, Sonora Review, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies at the Millay Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and Monson Arts.

    Tammy Heejae Lee is a Korean American writer from Davis, CA. She holds a BA from UC Davis and an MFA in fiction from the University of San Francisco, where she received a post-graduate teaching fellowship. A Tin House Summer Workshop, VONA/Voices and Sewanee alum, her writing has appeared in Sundog, The Offing, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and PANK, among others. She is currently working on her first novel about expat and hagwon culture in Seoul. 

    Uche Okonkwo has an MFA in fiction from Virginia Tech and a master’s in creative writing from University of Manchester, UK. Her stories have been published or are forthcoming in One Story, Ploughshares, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019, A Public Space, Lagos Noir, Per Contra, and Ellipsis. She was a 2019 Bernard O’Keefe Scholar at Bread Loaf, and a 2017 resident at Writers Omi. She is the recipient of the 2020-2021 George Bennett Fellowship at Phillips Exeter Academy—a fellowship established to provide time and freedom from material considerations to a selected writer each year. She is working on her first short story collection. (Photo: Rohan Kamicheril)

    Timea Sipos is a Hungarian American writer, poet, and translator with an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her writing and translations appear in Prairie Schooner, Passages North, Juked, The Offing, Denver Quarterly, The Bisexual Poetry Anthology, and elsewhere. She is a proud 2021 Pushcart Prize nominee, a PEN/Robert J. Dau Prize nominee, a Miami Book Fair Emerging Writers Fellowship Honorable Mention, a Cecelia Joyce Johnson Award finalist, and winner of the Tenessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival Fiction Contest. Her work has received support from the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, Tin House, the American Literary Translators Association, the Hungarian Translators’ House, the Black Mountain Institute, and the Nevada Arts Council, among others. During her fellowship year, she will be finishing her short story collection and making headway on her novel. (Photo: Cris Kith)

    Brian Trapp is a fiction and creative nonfiction writer from Cleveland, Ohio. He has published work in the Kenyon Review, Longreads, Gettysburg Review, Narrative, Brevity, and Ninth Letter, among other places. He won an Oregon Arts Fellowship and had an essay selected as the #1 Longread of the Week by Longreads.com. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature and Disability Studies from the University of Cincinnati, where he was an associate editor of the Cincinnati Review. He now teaches at the University of Oregon. He will be at work on a memoir about his twin brother, Danny, who had cerebral palsy and intellectual disabilities and was also very funny. (Photo: Marjorie Celona)

• 2020–2021

  • Rita Chang-Eppig received her MFA from NYU. Her stories have appeared in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Kenyon Review Online, Clarkesworld, Santa Monica Review, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Writers Grotto, and she is working on her first novel.
    
    

    Tammy Delatorre has been recognized with numerous literary awards, including the Payton Prize, the Slippery Elm Prose Prize, CutBank’s Montana Prize for Nonfiction, and Columbia Journal Fall Contest Award. Her writing has appeared in Los Angeles Times, The Rumpus, Vice, Hobart Online, Arts & Letters, Lunch Ticket, and The Nervous Breakdown. She obtained her MFA in creative writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles, and during the fellowship she’ll be working on a memoir.

    
    Brice Particelli earned his Ph.D. in education from Columbia University. His nonfiction is in or forthcoming from Harper’s, Guernica, Salmagundi, and Fourth River, among others, and he is working on a narrative nonfiction book focused on educational (dis)information communities. His work can be found on Brice Particelli's website.
    
    

    Daniel Pearce is a writer and musician living in San Francisco. He teaches at UC Santa Cruz and is at work on a novel about academic fraud and police misconduct.
    
    

     

    Kate Osana Simonian is an Armenian-Australian novelist, essayist, and short-story writer, whose work focuses on gender, sexuality, immigration, and identity. Since moving from Sydney to the US, she's completed an English PhD at Texas Tech and published work in the Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly, Shenandoah, Chicago Tribune, and Best Australian Stories. In the fall, she will be teaching at California State University San Bernardino and eagerly revising her debut novel, The Cry of the Narcissist.
    
    

    Anthony Veasna So was a queer Cambodian-American writer from Stockton, CA. He held a B.A. from Stanford University and an M.F.A. in Fiction from Syracuse University, where he received a University Fellowship, the Joyce Carol Oates Award in Fiction, and a P.D. Soros Fellowship. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, n+1, Granta, and ZYZZYVA, and his comics have appeared in Hobart and Nashville Review. He was last working on a novel about three Cambodian-American cousins—a rapper, a standup comedian, and an illustrator—and his story collection, Afterparties, from Ecco/HarperCollins was published in summer 2021.

• 2019–2020

  • Mushfig Babayev is an Azerbaijani scholar and translator living in the United States. He holds a Ph.D. in Philology/American Literature from Azerbaijan University of Languages. His publications include translations of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and The Winter of Our Discontent and numerous scholarly articles on Steinbeck and other authors. He plans to use his Steinbeck Fellowship to produce translations of two more Steinbeck works: The Pearl (Mirvari) and Tortilla Flat (Tortilla məhəlləsi).
    
    

    Gabriela Garcia is a fiction writer and poet. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Tin House, Zyzzyva, Michigan Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly, and many other journals. She is the winner of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award and has received fellowships and residencies from Lighthouse Works, the Keller Estate, Sarabande Books, and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Gabriela received an MFA in fiction from Purdue University and is at work on a novel.
    
    

    Meron Hadero was born in Ethiopia and came to the U.S. in her childhood via East and West Germany. Her short stories have been published in Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, Zyzzyva, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, among others, and her writing also appears in The New York Times Book Review and the anthology The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives. She's been a fellow at Yaddo, Ragdale, and The MacDowell Colony, and holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, a JD from Yale Law School (Washington State Bar), and an AB from Princeton in history with a certificate in American studies.
    
    

    Carrie R. Moore is a Southern writer whose work examines African American ancestral histories and contemporary experiences. A graduate of the University of Southern California and Stanford University, she has published her fiction in The Normal School and received the Erica Landis Memorial and Tennessee Williams Scholarships. She is currently at work on a short story collection and novel.
    
    

    Shabnam Nadiya is a Bangladeshi writer and translator, based in California. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, her work has been published in Joyland, Asymptote, Flash Fiction International, Al Jazeera Online, Pank, Amazon’s Day One, Chicago Quarterly Review, Wasafiri, Words Without Borders, and Gulf Coast. She has also translated Moinul Ahsan Saber’s novel The Mercenary (Bengal Lights Books, 2016; Seagull Books, 2018); and Shaheen Akhtar's novel Beloved Rongomala (Bengal Lights Books, 2018; Seagull Books, 2019).
    
    

    Laura A. Zink lives in Oakland, teaches fiction writing at Berkeley City College, and was an organizer for the Beast Crawl Literary Festival. She earned her MFA at St. Mary’s College of California and her MA in English at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Her fiction has appeared in Broad River Review, Full of Crow, sPARKLE & bLINK, Naked Bulb 2016 Summer Anthology, Literally Stories, FICTION on the WEB, and The East Bay Review.

• 2018–2019

  • Katie M. Flynn’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Indiana Review, Joyland Magazine, Juked, Ninth Letter, Witness Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of Colorado Review’s Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction and a fellowship from the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto and serves as fiction editor at Split Lip Magazine.
    
    

    Laura Goode is the author of the novel SISTER MISCHIEF (Candlewick Press, 2011), and the collection of poems BECOME A NAME (Fathom Books, 2016); she co-wrote and produced the feature film FARAH GOES BANG, which premiered at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival and won the inaugural Nora Ephron Prize from Tribeca and Vogue. Her essays have appeared in Refinery29, BuzzFeed, ELLE, Glamour, New York Magazine, New Republic, Longreads, Catapult, and elsewhere. She received her BA and MFA from Columbia University and lives in San Francisco.
    
    

    Meng Jin's fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Masters Review, The Baltimore Review, Arkansas International, The Bare Life Review, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, she has received support from the Hunter College MFA, Hedgebrook, VSC, M on the Bund, the David TK Wong Fellowship, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She was born in Shanghai and currently lives in San Francisco, where she is finishing her first novel.
    
    

    Kirin Khan is a writer living in Oakland, CA who calls Albuquerque, New Mexico her hometown, and Peshawar, Pakistan her homeland. A 2016 VONA/Voices and 2017 Las Dos Brujas alum, 2017 PEN Emerging Voices Fellow, 2017 SF Writers Grotto Fellow, and 2018 AWP Writer to Writer Mentee, her work has appeared in The Margins, Your Impossible Voice, 7x7 LA, and sPARKLE & bLINK. Kirin is working on her first novel.
    
    

    Jill Logan has an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Teaching Fellow. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Zyzzyva, Michigan Quarterly Review, Crazyhorse, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere and have won a Writers at Work Fellowship and the Katherine Anne Porter Award for Fiction. She’s a Lecturer at San José State University and currently at work on her novel The Fracking.
    
    

    Christine Vines recently received her MFA in fiction from Cornell University, where she currently teaches English and creative writing. Her work has appeared in Joyland, Electric Literature, and The Writer's Chronicle, and was selected as a fiction finalist for the 2017 Jeffrey E. Smith Editor's Prize by The Missouri Review. Four four years, she ran the Fiction Addiction Reading Series in NYC. 

• 2017–2018

  • Dinika Amaral was born and raised in Bombay, India. A former banker with JP Morgan Chase, she has an M.A. and M.F.A. from New York University. Having completed The Flame of the Forest short story collection and novella, she will spend her fellowship year revising her novel—The Devil’s Bathtub.
    
    

    Caitlin Kindervatter-Clark has an MFA in Fiction from the University of Virginia, where she was a Poe/Faulkner fellow. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Washington Post, Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She teaches at UC Berkeley Extension and lives in San Francisco, where she is at work on a story collection and a novel. Read more at KinderClark.com.
    
    

    Dominica Phetteplace writes literary and science fiction. Her work has appeared in Asimov’s, F&SF, Clarkesworld, PANK, and The Los Angeles Review. She has won a Barbara Deming Award, a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and I-Park. She plans to complete a short story collection on the future of work.
    
    

    C. Kevin Smith is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow. His writing has won awards from the Templeton Foundation, the Arch & Bruce Brown Foundation and the Carl Cherry Center for the Arts. He is currently the University of Iowa Provost’s Visiting Writer in Fiction.
    
    

    Shruti Swamy was Vassar College's 50th W.K. Rose Fellow, and has been awarded residencies at the Millay Colony for the Arts, Hedgebrook, and Blue Mountain Center. Her work has appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016, Agni, the Kenyon Review Online, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She is also a Kundiman fiction fellow.
    
    

    

    Sunisa Manning is from Bangkok, and currently lives in Berkeley California. She’s writing a novel set in 1970s Thailand about student radicals.

• 2016–2017

  • Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is a Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange poetry winner and a Barbara Deming Fund grantee. Her work is published in crazyhorse, CALYX, The James Franco Review and Acentos Review, and she is a cofounder of Women Who Submit. Her debut poetry collection, Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge, was published by Sundress Publications in 2016. She plans to spend her fellowship year finishing Dear Lupe, an epistolary novel that imagines the story of “Curley’s Wife,” the nameless character from John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men.
    
    

    Gary Singh is a journalist who has published nearly 1,000 articles in trade and consumer publications. For 530 straight weeks, his newspaper columns have appeared in Metro, the alternative weekly paper of San Jose and Silicon Valley. His poems have been published in The Pedestal Magazine, Dirty Chai, Maudlin House and elsewhere. He is the author of The San Jose Earthquakes: A Seismic Soccer Legacy (2015, The History Press). He plans to spend his fellowship year working on a biography of A. D. M. Cooper (1856-1924), a controversial American painter who made the Old West his subject matter. He also plans to complete a contemporary novel already in progress and tangentially related to the nonfiction work. 

• 2015–2016

  • Candace Eros Diaz writes in the space where fact and fiction collide. She discovered her affinity to stretch genre at Saint Mary’s College of CA where she received a dual-concentration MFA in creative nonfiction and fiction. She lives in Oakland, CA and can be found at her Candace Eros Diaz website.
    
    

    Jennie Lin is working on a collection of short stories and a novel. She has a BA in English from Harvard and an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and was a 2013 Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Her stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, The Missouri Review, Zyzzyva, and other journals.
    
    

    Gabriel Thompson is the author of several books, including America's Social Arsonist: Fred Ross and Grassroots Organizing in the Twentieth Century (University of California Press, 2016). His writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, Mother Jones, Harper’s, and New York. He is the recipient of the Richard J. Margolis Award, the Studs Terkel Media Award, and the Sidney Award.

• 2014–2015

  • Cara Bayles holds a BA in English and Film Studies from Wesleyan University and a MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University. Her fiction has appeared in Meridian (University of Virginia), Trop, and the anthology Watching the Cash Roll in Since 2012. She traveled to India on a Leslie Epstein Global Fellowship in Fiction, and she was a finalist for the 2013 New Orleans Tennessee Williams Festival Prize in Fiction. She is an award-winning reporter who has covered the streets of Boston and the bayous of southern Louisiana. Her journalism has appeared in the Boston Globe, the Houma Courier, the Thibodaux Daily Comet, and Beer Advocate magazine. She will spend her year as a Steinbeck Fellow completing her novel.
    
    

    Yalitza Ferreras received a BA in English and a BA in Political, Legal, and Economic Analysis from Mills College and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is a winner of the University of Michigan’s Nicholas Delbanco Thesis Prize and a fellowship from the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. She has an essay in Wise Latinas: Writers on Higher Education and a short story in Daring to Write: Contemporary Narratives by Dominican Women. She was raised in New York and the Dominican Republic, and currently resides in San Francisco where she is at work on a novel and a collection of short stories.
    
    

    Reese Okyong Kwon has published in Ploughshares, the Believer, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, and elsewhere. A recipient of scholarships from Yaddo, Ledig House, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, she has been named one of Narrative’s “30 Below 30” writers. She is working on a novel.

• 2013–2014

  • Vanessa Hua is an award-winning writer and journalist. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in ZYZZVA, Calyx, New York Times, Salon, and elsewhere, and one of her short stories won the Atlantic student fiction prize. She has been a staff writer at the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, and Hartford Courant, and has filed stories from Panama, China, South Korea, and Burma. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, she is a graduate of Stanford University and UC Riverside's MFA program. She is at work on a novel and can be found at Vanessa Hua's website.
    
    

    Tommy Mouton earned his B.S. in urban forestry from Southern University and A&M College and his MFA from San José State University. His poetry and fiction have been in Reed Magazine and an excerpt from his novel-in-progress What We Do Cherish recently appeared in Callaloo. Born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, raised in Moss Bluff, he currently lives in San José.
    
    

    Dallas Woodburn received her BA in Creative Writing from USC and her MFA in Fiction from Purdue University. She was the recipient of the Ninth Glass Woman Prize and her collection of short stories was a finalist for the 2012 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Nashville Review, Monkeybicycle, Arcadia, and Louisiana Literature. She has also published nonfiction in The Los Angeles Times, Writer's Digest, and Family Circle, and her short plays have been produced in Los Angeles and New York City. Connect with her at Write On! and Day-By-Day Masterpiece.

• 2012–2013

  • Lenore Rebecca Harris is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of San Francisco, where she earned a Master of Arts in Writing. She was an original member of WritersCorp, a unit of Americorps, the domestic Peace Corps program established by President Clinton. Through WritersCorps, she worked on several creative-writing projects with young people throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. She has taught English and Creative Writing to middle school, high school and community college students. Currently, she is a community college English instructor. She lives in Oakland, California.
    
    

    Marian Palaia received her MFA in 2012 from The University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she is the prose editor for Devil’s Lake. She also holds a relatively ancient MA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State. She was nominated for a 2010 AWP Intro Award, has received a Seattle Arts Council Individual Artists Award, has had stories published in Passages North and River Oak Review, and has twice been a Glimmer Train Fiction Award finalist. Marian is currently working on a novel, a collection of short stories, and a collection of non-fiction pieces, which are not necessarily about dogs, but do feature some. She and her dog Tupelo grew up together in Missoula, Montana, and are moving to San Francisco in August 2012. 

• 2011–2012

  • Kirstin Chen holds a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from Emerson College, where she received the Graduate Writing Award for Fiction and was editor of the journal Redivider. She was the Stanley Elkin Scholar at the 2010 Sewanee Writers' Conference. Her fiction has appeared in Hobart, Juked, Fringe Magazine, and others, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best New American Voices anthology. Born and raised in Singapore, she now resides in San Francisco, where she is completing her first novel, Soy Sauce for Beginners.
    
    

    John T. Newman holds a BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he currently teaches composition. He received his MFA in fiction from San Jose State University in December of 2010, where he was twice awarded the Majorie McLaughlin Folendorf Scholarship for outstanding achievement in creative writing. He has worked as a professional writer, editor, illustrator, and musician, and spent ten years as a travel writer working almost exclusively in tropical countries. He is the author of Scuba Diving and Snorkeling for Dummies and dozens of travel stories for national magazines—most recently for A Moveable Feast: Life-Changing Food Adventures Around the World. He is currently working on a novel with the working title of Little Monsters, as well as a collection of travel stories and a second novel project.

• 2010–2011

  • Leah Griesmann grew up in Northern California and American Samoa. She earned her B.A. in Comparative Literature at Brandeis University and her M.A. in Creative Writing at Boston University. She has taught writing and literature at Boston University, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Hanyang University in Ansan, South Korea.  Her stories have recently appeared in The Cortland Review, Union Station, Litro Magazine, The Weekly Rumpus, J Journal: New Writing on Justice, and PEN Center USA’s The Rattling Wall, and have been read or performed at Sacramento Stories on Stage, The Center for Literary Arts, Why There Are Words, and Litquake San Francisco. The recipient of a 2013 DAAD research grant in fiction in Berlin, Germany, she is currently at work on a novel and a collection of stories.
    
    

    Julie Reynolds has been a Nieman Journalism Fellow at Harvard, an Institute for Justice and Journalism Fellow at the University of Southern California and a Frank McCulloch Investigative Reporting Fellow at the Center for Investigative Reporting. Reynolds was editor of the Latino literary journalism magazine El Andar from 1998 to 2002, and is currently a staff writer at The Monterey County Herald. She reported and co-produced the PBS documentary “Nuestra Familia, Our Family,” about gangs in a farm community, which won Investigative Reporters and Editors’ highest honor, the Tom Renner Medal for Crime Reporting, as well as Best Documentary awards from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the Chicano Film Festival in Mexico City. She is now writing a literary nonfiction book called The Cause, which explores ten years in the lives of Norteño gang members in California’s idyllic Salinas Valley.

• 2009–2010

  • Andrew Milward won the 2011 Juniper Prize for Fiction from The University of Massachusetts Press for his story collection, titled The Agriculture Hall of Fame, which will be published in 2012. Milward grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, and lives in San Francisco, where he teaches creative writing at an arts-based day program for adults with developmental disabilities. A 2008 graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he was a McCreight Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin in 2009. He has been a Writing Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and a Resident Artist at the Santa Fe Art Institute. Milward was a finalist for the National Magazine Award, and his fiction has appeared in many places, including Zoetrope, The Southern Review, Columbia, Conjunctions, and Best New American Voices 2010.
    
    

    Skip Horack was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University from 2006-08. He holds a BA from Florida State University in English/Creative Writing, and a JD law degree. A native of Louisiana, his fiction has appeared in The Southeast Review, New Delta Review, Louisiana Literature, Southern Review, StoryQuarterly, Epoch, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. His short story collection, The Southern Cross, won the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference 2008 Bakeless Fiction Prize and will be published by Mariner Books in August 2009. He is currently at work on a novel.
    
    

    Katie Chase's first published story was selected from The Missouri Review for The Best American Short Stories 2008 and the 2009 Pushcart Prize anthology. She is a recent fellow of the MacDowell Colony and the recipient of a 2009-10 Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award. At the University of Iowa, where she received her MFA, she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow and a Provost's Postgraduate Writing Fellow. This year she is completing a collection of short stories and trying out a novel.

• 2008–2009

  • Cora Stryker is a former Tropical Field Biologist and Urban Gardener. She received the University of California Poet Laureate Award, the Mary C. Mohr Poetry Award, and the Bobette Bibo Gugliotta Memorial Scholarship in Creative Writing. She recently attended the summer fiction workshop at Squaw Valley. She is currently at work on her first novel, Manzanita, set in a post-petroleum San Francisco.
    
    

    Cristine Gonzalez (MFA, Columbia University) has worked as a reporter for news organizations including the Associated Press and the Portland Oregonian and was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Mexico. She is writing a memoir about four generations of her mother's family in Japan, Peru and the United States called The House in Solitude Square.
    
    

    Jasmin Darznik was born in Tehran and received her doctorate in English literature from Princeton. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, ZYZZYVA, and Cimarron Review. The recipient of the 2006 Tanenbaum Award from the San Francisco Foundation and the Marin Art Council's 2005-2007 New Work Fellowship in Creative Prose, she has also earned honors and distinctions from The Iowa Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, and the Norman Mailer Writers' Colony. Her short essay on her relationship with her mother was published in the New York Times Sunday May 9, 2010, edition.

• 2007–2008

  • Lysley Tenorio earned his MFA from the University of Oregon, and has published stories in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Manoa, and The Chicago Tribune. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he has also received fellowships from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Phillips Exeter Academy, Yaddo, and The MacDowell Colony. His work has also been included in the Best New American Voices and Pushcart Prize Anthologies. His collection, tentatively titled Monstress, will be out early 2012 from Ecco/HarperCollins, and a novel will follow with the same publisher. The summer 2011 fiction issue of The Atlantic also features his work.
    
    

    Peter Nathaniel Malae is the author of the story collection, Teach the Free Man, a 2007 Notable Book selection by the Story Prize and a current finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award. His prose and poetry have appeared in the Missouri Review, Southwest Review, Witness, ZYZZYVA, Best American Mysteries (2003) and Best American Essays (2004). In fall 2007 he received the Joseph Henry Jackson Award from the San Francisco Intersection for the Arts for the manuscript of his novel, What We Are, which was subsequently published by Grove Press in 2010. 
    
    

    Dan White earned his MFA from Columbia University. A veteran journalist, his articles and essays have appeared in numerous newspapers, magazines and journals, including the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and Backpacker Magazine. His book titled The Cactus Eaters, which incorporates natural history and biographical sketches of Western explorers, outlaws and pioneers with his 4,250km (2,650-mile) walk from Mexico to Canada will be published by HarperCollins in 2008.

• 2006–2007

  • Syda Patel Day's novel, A Waterless River, is forthcoming in September 2009 (Persea/Norton). She is at work on her next novel, which is set in San Francisco and New Orleans. She has been chosen for writing residencies at The Headlands Center for the Arts, Yaddo, the Vermont Studio Center, and Breadloaf. She has been the recipient of a Ford Foundation Fellowship, the Lewis Fellowship at Harvard, and a Holtzmann and Coker Fellowship at Yale. She holds a J.D. from Yale.
    
    

    Charles McLeod holds an MFA from the University of Virginia and was a 2005-06 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in such publications as CutBank, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, Third Coast and ZYZZYVA. He is currently finishing a collection of short stories and beginning work on a novel.
    
    

    Kara Levy received a BA from Swarthmore College and an MFA from Columbia University, where she taught creative writing and was co-coordinator of Columbia Artists/Teachers. She is working on a collection of short stories about illness and other failings of the body, and on two longer projects of fiction.

• 2005–2006

  • John Lee received his MFA from the University of Michigan, where he was a Rackham Fellow. He was subsequently awarded the Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin, the New York Times Foundation Residency at Yaddo, and the Norio Sugano & Leah Middlebrook Fellowship at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. A member of the writing faculty at Stanford University, he is currently completing the project he began while a Steinbeck Fellow, a collection of stories about Korean exiles in Asia and the West.
    
    

    Sara Houghteling holds a BA from Harvard College and an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she received the Avery Hopwood Novel Award. She was also the recipient of a 2004-2005 Fulbright grant to Paris. Her historical novel-in-progress Pictures at an Exhibition (Knopf, 2009) recounts the life of a family of Parisian Jews attempting to retrieve their looted art collection after World War II. It was reviewed in the New York Times. On April 15, 2010, the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford presented Houghteling with the 2009 Edward Lewis Wallant Award for her novel. Established more than forty-five years ago by Dr. and Mrs. Irving Waltman of West Hartford, the award honors the memory of the late Edward Lewis Wallant, author of "The Pawnbroker" and other works of fiction. Considered today one of the oldest and most prestigious Jewish literary awards in the United States, it is presented to an American Jewish writer, preferably unrecognized, whose published work of fiction is deemed to have significance for the American Jew. Other Wallant Award winners include Cynthia Ozick, Curt Leviant, Chaim Potok and Myla Goldberg.

• 2004–2005
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    Roxanna Font holds a BA from the University of Michigan and an MFA from New York University. The recipient of writing residencies from the Hedgebrook Writers' Retreat and The Djerassi Resident Artists Program, she is an Editor of the Bellevue Literary Review as well as an Editor at Avalon Publishing Group. In fall 2007 she received the prestigious Mary Tanenbaum Award from the San Francisco Intersection for the Arts for the manuscript of her memoir, The Fig Tree, the project on which she worked as a Steinbeck Fellow in 2004-2005. The award, sponsored by The San Francisco Foundation and administered by Intersection for the Arts since 1991, are offered annually in the amount of $2,000 each to encourage young writers (20 to 35 years old), who are either California-born or currently residing in Northern California or Nevada for an unpublished manuscript-in-progress. Font's work was chosen from over 150 manuscripts of fiction (novels and short stories), poetry, nonfiction prose, graphic novel, and drama. The selection committee's citation reads as follows:

    In her compelling manuscript of nonfiction "The Fig Tree," Roxanna Font illuminates the complex process of piecing together not just the disparate threads of the narrative of her Cuban-American family, but also of trying to claim ownership of that narrative, and by extension, her connection to the island nation of Cuba. Through the discovery of her deceased great-grandmother Elisa's poetry and letters, Roxanna attempts to understand and intervene in a narrative fraught with the politics and rhetoric of post-revolutionary, anti-Castro Cuba which has left little room for her own voice. Her Grandmother's writings, including a narrative of a fig tree she'd planted in her yard in the town of Holguin prior to the revolution, become the focus of Roxanna's musings on a Cuba forbidden and out of reach to her because of both the embargo and because of her family's departure during Castro's revolution which has caused them to read Cuba through the singularized lens of communism. The author explores the complexities of her own softer sense of "betrayal" by that island nation, and eventually she is able to travel to Cuba as part of a theatre troupe performing throughout the island. This return to the homeland enables her to confront her own assumptions and nostalgia (made more pronounced in her grandmother's writings) and to seek a bridge between the Cuba of her family's past and the Cuba that exists today. This is a project that works to recuperate the complexities of immigration and exile and to mine the fragmentary family narrative that is the product of a larger social and historical upheaval.

    Louise Freeman-Toole is the author of Standing Up to the Rock (University of Nebraska Press, 2001), a memoir of life on a historic cattle ranch in Idaho's Hells Canyon. Standing Up to the Rock won the Idaho Book Award and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award in 2002 and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Willa Award from Women Writing the West. As a Steinbeck Fellow at SJSU, she is working on a book about her reclusive Alaska grandmother, based on a secret diary written in 1918. The project is also being supported by a $20,000 Howard Foundation Fellowship from Brown University. Freeman-Toole has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio, and the Writers Colony at Dairy Hollow. She has been writer in residence at the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park in Skagway, Alaska, and the Island Institute, in Sitka, Alaska. Louise Freeman Toole lives in a remote village on the Alaska-Yukon border.
    
    

    Diana Spechler's first novel, Who By Fire (Harper Perennial, 2009), has been excerpted in the Greensboro Review and Moment. Her second novel, Skinny, is due out from Harper Perenneial in spring 2011. Her work has appeared in Esquire, Nerve,Glimmer Train Stories, Moment, Lilith, and in a variety of national literary journals and magazines. She received her MFA degree from the University of Montana and currently lives in New York City. Find more information on Diana Spechler's website.

• 2003–2004

  • Jon Christensen is an adjunct assistant professor and Pritzker fellow in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Jon was executive director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West, an interdisciplinary center for research, teaching, new media and journalism at Stanford University before moving to UCLA. Jon has been an environmental journalist and science writer for 30 years. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Nature, High Country News, and many other newspapers, magazines, journals, and radio and television shows. Jon was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford in 2002-2003 and a Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University in 2003-2004, before returning to Stanford to work on a Ph.D. in History. He is finishing a book entitled “Critical Habitat: A History of Thinking with Things in Nature,” and is currently organizing a large collaborative project to crowd-source a new, public environmental history of the Bay Area with libraries, museums, archives, nonprofit organizations, scholars, researchers, the media, and the public during the Year of Bay in 2013. Write to him at: [email protected]

• 2002–2003

  • Shannon Hamann (1966-2004) received a B.A. with distinction in Communications, film and broadcasting, with an English minor, from the University of Iowa in December 1986 (graduating Phi Beta Kappa). He received an MFA from the University of Iowa Program in Creative Writing (The Iowa Writers' Workshop) in December 1991, and was working on a novel during his time in the Steinbeck Fellows' program. The work remained unfinished at his untimely death. His family has set up a Shannon Hamann memorial website.
    
    

    Robert F. James received his MFA in Creative Writing with a primary concentration in fiction and secondary concentration in creative nonfiction from San José State University. He holds a BA in English (Creative Writing) from George Mason University. His short fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Carve Magazine, Rainbow Curve, why vandalism?, and numerous other publications. He continues to work on a fictional memoir and an historical novel set in 1920's Southern Illinois, the preface of which was published as a short story, "In the Old World," in Carve Magazine's September 2006 issue. Robert is also Project Editor for the Outdoor Life Magazine Survival Manual (2012) and another book for Field and Stream magazine (sched. 2013).
    
    

    Greta Manville's Steinbeck Fellowship involved updating, researching, and compiling new entries for what has become the online searchable bibliography of secondary literature on John Steinbeck. Since 2003, Ms. Manville has continued researching and writing, hunting down errata, providing invaluable insights and updates, and lending her keen editing skill to the Center's staff. She lives in Arizona, where she writes mystery and suspense novels, participates in writers' conferences and critique groups, and has served as a contest judge for fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. She has won first place in contests conducted by SouthWest Writers and Authorlink.com as well as the grand prize for the Sparrowgrass Forum's "Poetic Voices of America" contest in 1999. Ms. Manville (who also writes as G. C. Manville) belongs to the Arizona Authors Association, Sisters in Crime (Desert Sleuths Chapter), and West Valley Authors Association. Death Key is her third published novel with two others in progress. Greta was the contest coordinator for the 2006 Arizona Authors Association's Literary Contest.
    
    

    Eran Williams' Steinbeck Fellowship resulted in a manuscript of short  stories based in West Africa where he served as a Peace Corps volunteer planting trees in Mali, and as an English Teaching Fellow setting up training programs at the Central Bank of Guinea. Four of the short stories were published in The Santa Monica Review and The Crab Orchard Review. One of the stories, "The Helpmeet" won both a Phelan Award and the Associated Writing Programs Intro Journal Award.  Eran is currently an English Language Officer in the Foreign Service.
    
    

    Talila Baron is an award-winning, Bay Area-based writer who has written short stories, one-act and full-length plays, and screenplays. In 2002-03, she was a Steinbeck Creative Writing Fellow and completed her first collection of short stories. In 2001, she was a semi-finalist in the prestigious Chesterfield Screenwriting Competition as well as the PlayLabs Theatre Festival. In 2003, her first full-length play, Corpus Delicti, received a staged reading through the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, California. In July, 2004, her second play, Burning, won the Jane Chambers Award and received a reading at NYU as well as the Abingdon Theatre in New York. In March, 2005, her most recent full-length work, Afterimage, received a workshop production at the Magic. Ms. Baron holds an MFA in playwriting from San Francisco State University.

• 2001–2002

  • Katharine A. Rodger came to California from Massachusetts as an undergraduate. She completed her BA at University of California at San Diego. She entered the MA program in English at SJSU and worked throughout her time there as a graduate assistant at the Center for Steinbeck Studies. Her MA thesis was published in 2002 as Renaissance Man of Cannery Row: The Life and Letters of Edward F. Ricketts. As a Steinbeck Fellow, Katie began research on what would become her second book, a collection of Ricketts's essays, published in 2006 as Breaking Through. She received her PhD from University of California at Davis in June 2010.