Congratulations Student Amanda Mei Kim, 22-23 Steinbeck Fellow

Congratulations to Creative Writing Student Amanda Mei Kim for being awarded a spot in the the 2022-2023 Steinbeck Fellows Program!

The Steinbeck Fellows Program is financed by the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University. It awards six fellowships each in the amount of $15,000 to emerging writers. In recent years, the Steinbeck has emerged as one of America's premiere writing fellowships. Among our recent Fellows, we count the late Anthony Veasna So, winner of the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as Meron Hadero, Gabriela Garcia, R.O. Kwon, Dallas Woodburne and many others. 

More on Amanda Mei Kim and the other 2022-23 Steinbeck Fellows:

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 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.

Vivian 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. 

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. 

Meghana Mysore, from Portland, Oregon, is a graduate of Yale University and a creative writing MFA candidate at Hollins University, where she holds a graduate assistantship and teaching fellowship. The second-place winner in prose in the 2021 Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Contest, Mysore is also the runner-up for the 2021 Melanie Hook Rice Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Hollins nominee in fiction for the 2022 AWP Intro Journals Project. Mysore’s writing has been published in The Yale Review, Boston Review, The Rumpus, Indiana Review,wildness, the Asian American Writers' Workshop's The Margins, Roxane Gay's The Audacity, and the anthology A World Out of Reach (Yale University Press). The recipient of fellowships and support from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Tin House Winter Workshop, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Mysore is at work on a novel exploring loss, desire, and joy in three generations of an Indian American family.

Bobuq Sayed is a writer, multidisciplinary artist and community organiser of the Afghan diaspora. They coordinate an LGBTIQA+ mentoring program at Queerspace, they are the 2019 guest editor of Un Magazine and, in a former life, they edited the online and print arms of Archer Magazine, Australia’s leading journal of sex, gender and identity. Their work has appeared in numerous publications and festivals and they are a core member of Embittered Swish, an all trans and non-binary performance collective.

Annie Vy Trinh holds an MFA from the University of Kansas and M.A. from Mississippi State. Trinh’s fiction has appeared in Sycamore Review, Joyland, Potomac Review, Passages North and several other venues. Trinh’s work has earned a Pushcart nomination and was selected as a finalist for a Best of the Net award in non-fiction.