2016-2017 Steinbeck Fellows

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo is a Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange poetry winner and a Barbara Deming Fund grantee. Her work is published in crazyhorse, CALYX, The James Franco Review and Acentos Review, and she is a cofounder of Women Who Submit. Her debut poetry collection, Built with Safe Spaces, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications. She plans to spend her fellowship year finishing Dear Lupe,an epistolary novel that imagines the story of “Curley’s Wife,” the nameless character from John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men.

Gary Singh is a journalist who has published nearly 1,000 articles in trade and consumer publications. For 530 straight weeks, his newspaper columns have appeared in Metro, the alternative weekly paper of San Jose and Silicon Valley. He is the author of The San Jose Earthquakes: A Seismic Soccer Legacy (The History Press 2015). His poems have been published in The Pedestal Magazine, Dirty Chai, Maudlin House and elsewhere. He plans to spend his fellowship year working on a biography of A. D. M. Cooper (1856-1924), a controversial American painter who made the Old West his subject matter. He also plans to complete a contemporary novel already in progress and tangentially related to the nonfiction work.

All events are free, open to the public, and wheelchair accessible.