News and Upcoming Events

Fall Reading 2025-2026 Steinbeck Fellows

Tuesday, December 2 at 7:00 pm
Steinbeck Center Room 590, Martin Luther King Jr. Library

Join us for an evening with 3 of our 6 2025-2026 Steinbeck Fellows: Kate Busatto, Nayereh Doosti, and Sarah Matsui. Light refreshments and desserts will be provided. All are welcome!

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.

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.

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.

Reflections 

Read the reflections [pdf] from the Steinbeck Center's recently graduated Student Assistant, Courtney Westergren.

Steinbeck Center Sword Acquisition

The Steinbeck Center proudly exhibits this Sword with a declaration of Knighthood, a gift from John Steinbeck to his Sister Mary as a symbol of her courage as she fought cancer. King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table opened Steinbeck's eyes to the lasting power of literature and are the foundation to his belief in Human Rights and Dignity. John and Mary read the stories and their child's play inspired Steinbeck's talent for storytelling. His love for language, the sounds and sights that words convey, all tie together with the love for his sister and the nostalgia for the world created in childhood.

To see the sword in person, please refer to our Hours page.

John Steinbeck: A Writer's Vision

A short biography of author John Steinbeck's life and career, as told through archival photos and videos. Produced by the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University in October 2023.