The Steinbeck Fellows Program will hold its spring semester reading on May 7 at 7PM in the Steinbeck Center (MLK 590). The reading will feature 2025-2026 Fellows Olivia Cheng, Jennie Li and Bill Nguyen. This is a free event that everyone can attend.

Olivia Cheng is a writer from northern New Jersey. Her fiction can be found in The Threepenny Review, Guernica, EPOCH, The Georgia Review, and more. She holds an MFA in fiction and Zell Fellowship from the University of Michigan. She is currently working on her first novel.

Jennie Li is a writer from Honolulu, Hawai‘i. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and an MA from the University of California, Davis, where she received the Elliot Gilbert Memorial Prize in fiction. She was also a finalist for the 2020 Iowa Review Award in fiction. Her writing is inspired by her father’s emigration from Pakse, Laos, and her mother’s emigration from Icheon, South Korea. She is currently working on a novel that follows a civilian Laotian family as they flee their homeland near the end of the civil war. She teaches at Leeward Community College on the island of O‘ahu.

Bill Nguyen is a fiction writer from San José, California, and a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His writing has received fellowship support from Kundiman, the University of Iowa, and William Morris Endeavor.

The Steinbeck Fellows Program has helped to forward the careers of many remarkable writers working today, including best-selling novelists R.O. Kwon, Vanessa Hua and Gabriela Garcia, California Book Award winner Shruti Swamy, AKO Caine Prize winner Meron Hadero, O. Henry Prize winner Francisco Gonzalez, and many others. You can read more about the program here: https://www.sjsu.edu/steinbeck/awards-fellowships/steinbeck-fellowship/index.php