2017-2018 Steinbeck Fellows
Dinika Amaral was born and raised in Bombay, India. A former banker with JP Morgan Chase, she has
an M.A. and M.F.A. from New York University. Having completed The Flame of the Forest short story collection and novella, she will spend her fellowship year revising her
novel -- The Devil’s Bathtub.
Caitlin Kindervatter-Clark has an MFA in Fiction from the University of Virginia, where she was a Poe/Faulkner
fellow. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Washington Post, Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She teaches at UC Berkeley Extension and lives in San Francisco,
where she is at work on a story collection and a novel. Read more at KinderClark.com.
Sunisa Manning is from Bangkok, and currently lives in Berkeley California. She’s writing a novel
set in 1970s Thailand about student radicals.
Dominica Phetteplace writes literary and science fiction. Her work has appeared in Asimov’s, F&SF, Clarkesworld, PANK, and The Los Angeles Review. She has won a Barbara Deming Award, a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the MacDowell
Colony and I-Park. She plans to complete a short story collection on the future of
work.
C. Kevin Smith is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow. His
writing has won awards from the Templeton Foundation, the Arch & Bruce Brown Foundation
and the Carl Cherry Center for the Arts. He is currently the University of Iowa Provost’s
Visiting Writer in Fiction.
Shruti Swamy was Vassar College's 50th W.K. Rose Fellow, and has been awarded residencies at the
Millay Colony for the Arts, Hedgebrook, and Blue Mountain Center. Her work has appeared
in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016, Agni, the Kenyon Review Online, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She is also a Kundiman fiction fellow.