|2004 - 2005 Steinbeck Fellows Forum_______

A forum with the 2004-05 Steinbeck Fellows: Roxanna Font, Louise Freeman-Toole, and Diana Spechler will be held on Thursday, April 7 at 7:30 PM in the Engineering Building Auditorium (Room 189). They will be reading from their work and answering questions.

2004 - 2005 Steinbeck Fellows

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.

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.

Diana Spechler's novel-in-progress, Who By Fire, has been excerpted in The Greensboro Review and Moment Magazine. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in a variety of publications, including in Lilith, in The New Orleans Review, and on McSweeney's. She is the recent recipient of both the Chris O'Malley Fiction Prize from The Madison Review and the Jerry Jazz Musician Short Story Contest.

About the Steinbeck Fellows Program

The Steinbeck Fellows Program of San Jose State University, which was endowed through the generosity of Martha Heasley Cox, Professor Emerita, offers new writers of any age and background the opportunity to pursue a significant project in collaboration with other writers, faculty and graduate students. The Steinbeck Fellowship Program is named in honor of author John Steinbeck and is guided by his lifetime of work in literature, the media, and environmental activism. Fellows may be appointed in many fields, including literary scholarship, fiction, drama, education, science, and the media. The genre of poetry, however, is excluded.

Currently, SJSU offers one-year fellowships in Steinbeck scholarship and in creative writing. In awarding fellowships, the selection committee considers the quality of the candidate's proposal and any factors that would lead to expectations of future publication and other achievement. The creative writing fellowship does not require that there be any direct connection between Steinbeck’s works and that of the applicant. Applicants who are enrolled in a graduate program of study must furnish evidence that they have completed all coursework, except any course registration associated with a thesis.

The fellowships afford a stipend of $10,000. Housing assistance may be available. Residency in the San Jose area is expected during the academic year.

Apply for Steinbeck Fellowship.