Steinbeck Fellowship
The Steinbeck Fellows Program of San José State University was endowed through the generosity of Martha Heasley Cox. It offers writers of any age and background a $15,000 fellowship to finish a significant writing project. Named in honor of author John Steinbeck, the program is guided by his lifetime of work in literature, the media, and environmental activism.
Fellowships are currently offered in Creative Writing (excluding poetry) and Steinbeck Studies. Fellows may be appointed in many fields, including literary scholarship, fiction, drama, education, science and the media.
Find more Application Information before you apply.
Graduate Steinbeck Fellows
The Center also supports up to six exceptional incoming students in San José State's
MFA/Creative Writing and MA/English programs with full in-state tuition for their first year of study. All applicants
to the two programs are considered for these fellowships; there is no additional application.
Visit our Graduate Steinbeck Fellows page to learn more.
Steinbeck / Gentlemen of the Road Service Fellowship
The Steinbeck / Gentlemen of the Road Service Fellowship brings together a cohort of students from Stanford University and San José State University to complete a summer of community service in Steinbeck Country. The Fellowship is funded by “Gentlemen of the Road,” the community engagement organization of the folk-rock band Mumford & Sons, from the proceeds of a concert the band played at Stanford University in September 2019 upon receiving the John Steinbeck Award. The Fellowship is open to students from any race, color, religion or creed, national origin or ancestry, sex, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, age, marital or domestic partner status, political affiliation, HIV or AIDS status, or disability. Fellows receive a stipend of $5,500, with an additional $2,200 possible depending on financial need.
This Year's Steinbeck Fellows
Kate Busatto is originally from Pittsburgh. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Drama
from Carnegie Mellon University and a Master of Divinity from Yale University. Her
work has been featured in The Threepenny Review, Five Dials, The Moth, and Tampa Review, among others. Kate has received support to attend the 2025 Sewanee Writers’ Conference
as a Tennessee Williams Scholar in Fiction. She is an incoming 2025-26 Steinbeck Fellow
at San Jose State University. Kate is currently working on her first novel.
Olivia Cheng is a writer from northern New Jersey. Her fiction can be found in The Threepenny Review, Guernica, EPOCH, The Georgia Review, and more. She holds an MFA in fiction and Zell Fellowship from the University of
Michigan. She is currently working on her first novel.
Nayereh Doosti is a fiction writer and translator from Shiraz, Bushehr, and elsewhere.
She is a recipient of the Epiphany Magazine Breakout 8 Writers Prize, the St. Botolph
Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award, the Key West Literary Seminar Emerging Writer
Award, the Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship, a GrubStreet Literary
Grant, a Bread Loaf Participant Fellowship, a PEN/Heim Translation Grant, and a PEN
Presents x Booker Prize Foundation Grant. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming
in Epiphany Magazine, The Common Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, and Nowruz Journal, among others. Her Persian translation of Aleksander Hemon’s The Book of My Lives
was published by Goman Press in Tehran in Spring 2024. As a Steinbeck Fellow, she
will be completing her first novel. She lives between Berkeley and Lisbon.
Jennie Li is a writer from Honolulu, Hawai‘i. She holds an MFA from the University
of Oregon and an MA from the University of California, Davis, where she received the
Elliot Gilbert Memorial Prize in fiction. She was also a finalist for the 2020 Iowa
Review Award in fiction. Her writing is inspired by her father’s emigration from Pakse,
Laos, and her mother’s emigration from Icheon, South Korea. She is currently working
on a novel that follows a civilian Laotian family as they flee their homeland near
the end of the civil war. She teaches at Leeward Community College on the island of
O‘ahu.
Sarah Matsui is the winner of the Sewanee Review Nonfiction Contest, the Fractured Lit Contest, and the Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Award. Her work has appeared
or is forthcoming in the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, NPR Code Switch, Jacobin Magazine, The Southern Review, The Seventh Wave, Beloit Poetry Journal, Pleiades, and The Offing. She is the recipient of a 2024-2025 Friends of the San Francisco Public Library
Residency, the 2025 Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Christina Chiu AAPI Writers
Fellowship, and a 2025 Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, where she will be working
on her debut essay collection.
Bill Nguyen is a fiction writer from San José, California, and a recent graduate of
the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His writing has received fellowship support from Kundiman,
the University of Iowa, and William Morris Endeavor.
