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
Tracy Abeyta is a third-grade dropout who didn’t get a GED but did snag an MFA from the Institute
of American Indian Arts. She’s published short stories in Hobart Pulp, the Brooklyn Review, Diagram, Boston Review, Epoch and Prairie Schooner. Her Prairie Schooner piece made The Best American Essays notable literary nonfiction list of 2024. An
excerpt from her book-in-progress, Calavera, was a top ten finalist for the Sewanee Review’s Nonfiction Contest. She has received
support to attend Breadloaf, Kenyon Review, Sun Valley Writer’s Conference, the Fine
Arts Work Center, and Tin House. In 2025, she won the Litfest Emerging Nonfiction
Fellowship and was a Periplus fellow. She just completed the 2025 TV writing lab fellowship
for the Native American Media Alliance program and was awarded a Netflix Accelerator
Grant. She teaches literature and lives in Oakland with a free-roaming lionhead rabbit,
Stormy, who belongs to a banana 🍌mafia.
Cristina Fríes is a Colombian-American fiction writer based in San Francisco, CA. Her work has appeared
in PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2018, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Epoch Literary Magazine, Action / Spectacle, War, Literature & the Arts, Vestal Review, and swamp pink. She is the recipient of a PEN/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, a Fulbright
Fellowship in Creative Writing, a Tin House Scholarship, and the Adroit Journal Veasna
So Scholarship. She received her MA in Creative Writing from UC Davis, where she received
the Elliot Gilbert Prize in Fiction. She has written a collection of stories, and
is at work on a novel and an opera libretto. More at cristinafries.com.
Angela Frances Hui is a writer from San Francisco. Her work has appeared in swamp pink (formerly Crazyhorse), EPOCH, Electric Literature, and the Chicago Review of Books. She has a BA in English from Harvard College, where she served as fiction editor
of The Harvard Advocate. She is working on a novel and a short story collection.
Billy Lezra holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. They were the
winner of the 2024 Ploughshares Emerging Writers' Award in Nonfiction. They have contributed
work to Electric Literature, The Washington Post, CNN, and elsewhere. Their work has been supported by Bread
Loaf, The McCormack Writing Center, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Los Angeles
Review of Books’ Publishing Workshop, and LAMBDA Literary. They are the co-founder
and editor-in-chief of Rough Cut Press, a monthly magazine that publishes voices from the LGBTQIA community.
Swati Sudarsan is a writer from Michigan. They are a 2025 Asian American Writers' Workshop Margins
Fellow, 2025 Periplus Fellow, and the recipient of the 2023 Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless
Nason Award. Their writing has additionally been supported by organizations such as
Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Granum Prize, McCormack Writing Center (formerly
Tin House), Kenyon Review, and more. Their work can be found in or is forthcoming from the Cleveland Review of Books, Cake Zine, and Kismet, among others. During their fellowship year, they will be working on a campus novel
that examines the perversion of nurturing, excess and emptiness, and the beauty and
burden of inhabiting a femme body through the lens of the trauma dialectic.
Preeti Vangani is a poet & writer from Bombay based in San Francisco. She is the author of the poetry
collections, Mother Tongue Apologize (2019) and Fifty Mothers, (River River Books, 2026). Her work has appeared in AGNI, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner among other places. Her debut short story won the 2021 PEN/Dau Emerging Writers Prize.Vangani
has been a resident at UCross, Djerassi and Ragdale. She has received grants from
San Francisco Arts Commission, YBCA, and The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She holds
an MFA in Writing from University of San Francisco and teaches in the program. As
a Steinbeck fellow, she will be working on a short story collection that centers Indian
women and explores the intersections of loss, desire, sex and friendship
