News and Upcoming Events
Steinbeck's Landscapes
September 10 at 7 pm
Steinbeck Center, MLK Library Room 590
Visit the Center for Steinbeck Studies, MLK Library 5th Floor, for a reading by SJSU Professor Emerita Susan Shillinglaw from her new book Steinbeck's Landscapes: Where Story Meets Place, published by Timber Press/Hachette.
Steinbeck’s Landscapes is the first major work to focus on Steinbeck as a predominantly environmental writer. It highlights the places that the Nobel Prize–winning author cherished and explored throughout his life and examines the iconic stories they inspired. We learn how the Salinas Valley of his youth shaped East of Eden; how, in Cannery Row, the improbable diversity of human life washed together in a tight community not unlike a Monterey tidepool; and how, in The Grapes of Wrath, various human connections to land and soil inform every page of Steinbeck’s monumental novel.
This event is free and open to the public.
Going to the Moon
September 17 at 7 pm
Steinbeck Center, MLK Library Room 590
Visit the Center for Steinbeck Studies, MLK Library 5th Floor, for a reading by SJSU Lecturer Emerita Sally Ashton from her new book Going to the Moon, published by Duke University Press.
In 2022, poet Sally Ashton learned that one of her poems would be included in a time capsule to be sent to the Moon via Astrobotic’s 2024 Griffin/VIPER as part of the Lunar Codex project. For her, this event seemed like the high point in a life spent chasing the Moon, from a childhood inspired by the space race of the 1960s to an adulthood spent in contemplation and conversation with the sky. In Going to the Moon, Ashton marvels at the Moon’s powerful influence since the dawn of humanity—how we have, in our own ways, gone to the Moon, and what we have found. Contemplating lunar settlement in the light of history, culture, the rise of the space industry, and geopolitical conflict, Ashton shares her sense of wonder at the simple beauty of our unchanged Moon and reveals what is at stake in our contemporary attempts to colonize it.
This event is free and open to the public.
California Futures: Haunted Ecologies, Decolonial Relations
November 12 at 7 pm
Steinbeck Center, MLK Library Room 590
Visit the Center for Steinbeck Studies, MLK Library 5th Floor, for a reading by SJSU Associate Professor of Humanities Daniel Lanza Rivers from their new book California Futures: Haunted Ecologies, Decolonial Relations, published by Duke University Press.
California Futures is a critical study of California as a site of liberatory dreaming—one that takes up the history, politics, and afterlives of the region’s colonial imaginings as well as archives of resistance and world-making which strive toward Indigenous, decolonial, Black, queer, feminist, and anti-white supremacist futures. Attending carefully to the colonial, commercial, and environmental entanglements of the region, Daniel Lanza Rivers offers an account of the processes of speculation that worlded California into being. Rivers examines case studies such as the colonial cultures of grizzly bear eradication and reintroduction; the convergence of drought, industrial agriculture, and environmental toxicity in California's Central Valley; utopianism in the Klamath Mountains, from the Black Bear Ranch commune to Octavia Butler’s Parable series; dam removal and Native climate adaptation on the Klamath watershed; and the policing of unhoused people around Oakland's Lake Merritt. Through these case studies, Rivers interrogates the long histories of settler conquest, extractive and racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchy that have shaped California. They chart strategies for thinking beyond the colonial Anthropocene and toward the post-extractive and liberatory futures that emerge from and with decolonial land relations.
This event is free and open to the public.
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.
