SJSU Steinbeck Fellow Wins Prestigious Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award
Vanessa Hua, a 2013-14 Steinbeck Fellow, has won the 2015 Rona Jaffee Foundation Award, an annual award given to emerging women writers of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Hua joined five other women writers in New York for the awards ceremony, which was hosted by Pulitzer Prize winning poet and memoirist Tracy K. Smith, a former Foundation Award winner.
Writing on her blog, Hua says, “This amazing grant for emerging women writers will allow me to devote more time to my fiction, and provides much-needed encouragement to keep me going as I toil on my novel.”
The novel she mentions is Hua’s current project, A River of Stars, which tells the story of a pregnant Chinese factory clerk whose lover sends her to America to deliver the baby, thus giving his heir U.S. citizenship. Ms. Hua says, “The novel explores the intersecting lives of Chinese immigrants and the American-born who straddle the Pacific, who lead a transnational existence and hold a complicated relationship to their ancestral and adopted homelands—the clash between self and society, tradition and change.”
Hua’s collection of short stories, The Responsibility of Deceit, received the 2015 Willow Books Grand Prize Literature Award for Prose and will be published next year.
Hua came to SJSU as a Steinbeck Fellow in 2013, joining a long list of talented writers who have called the halls of SJSU home for a year. Since 2000, the program has brought thirty-six fellows to campus and distributed more than $360,000 to support their work. To date, twenty-three books have been published by Steinbeck Fellows program alumni, with more being added every year.
The program has its origins in Steinbeck himself who, when he was in his twenties, was given a small monthly allowance from his father that enabled him to keep writing. The Steinbeck Fellows program was established in this spirit. Every year, the Center for Steinbeck Studies selects two or three emerging writers and supports their work with a $10,000 stipend. The financial assistance is helpful, but former fellows have said that the vote of confidence is just as important.
Nick Taylor, Director of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, says he hopes that “alumni of the fellows program who become successful continue to ‘pay it forward’ as Steinbeck did when he gave his 1939 Pulitzer Prize money to his friend Ritchie Lovejoy, who was struggling with his own first book.”
Current Steinbeck Fellows include Candace Eros Diaz, whose work blends fact and fiction; Jennie Lin, who is working on a collection of short stories and a novel; and Gabriel Thompson, author of several books including Working in the Shadows, a behind-the-scenes look at the labor done by Latino immigrants. Diaz, Lin, and Thompson will read from their works at the Fall Fellows Reading this November in the MLK library. Please join us for an evening of engaging interaction with these outstanding young authors.
Fall Steinbeck Fellows Reading
Tues, November 17, 7:30pm, MLK 225/229
