Join the Steinbeck Center for a virtual Steinbeck Fellow Fall Reading in which three of our six Steinbeck Fellows A.J. Bermudez, Itto Outini and Mekiya Outini, and Xueyou Wang, will read from their current projects.

A.J. Bermudez is the author of Stories No One Hopes Are About Them, Winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award and current Lambda Literary Award Finalist. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s, Chicago Quarterly Review, Story, Boulevard, Creative Nonfiction, Electric Literature, The Masters Review, Columbia Journal, Chicago Review, The Offing, Baltimore Review, Epiphany, LitHub, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the Diverse Voices Award, the PAGE Award, and the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize. She currently serves as Editor of The Maine Review. Her work gravitates toward contemporary explorations of power, privilege, and place. 

Itto Outini is a journalist, Fulbright scholar, accessibility advocate, human rights activist, and founder of Fulbrighters with Disabilities, a global, virtual chapter of the Fulbright Association dedicated to supporting students and scholars with disabilities around the world. Her life story, from growing up in rural Morocco, to being blinded by a family member at the age of seventeen, to spending six years homeless while pursuing education, to becoming a Fulbright scholar and working for the United Nations, has been featured by numerous media outlets, including BBC. Itto earned her MA in journalism and strategic media from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville and now lives with her husband, Mekiya, in Kansas City, Missouri. Mekiya Outini met Itto at the University of Arkansas, where he was studying for his MFA in fiction, tutoring international students, and working as a cultural ambassador. In 2022, they got married, and he took her name. Mekiya’s short fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in Chautauqua, the Michigan Quarterly Review, Willow Springs, and elsewhere, and the first two chapters of his novel, Ashes, Ashes, have been featured in the West Trade Review.

Itto and Mekiya Outini are co-founders of The DateKeepers, an international media platform dedicated to telling untold stories and spotlighting well-lived lives. They’re also hard at work on Itto’s memoir, Blindness is the Light of My Life.

Xueyou Wang is a writer living in Los Angeles, California. Her work focuses on immigrant women's experiences and transnational, transcultural stories. She is particularly interested in the intersection between Asian diaspora and Latin American cultures. Born in China and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, Xueyou graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California and a Master of Arts in Women's and Gender Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her work has appeared in Discover Nikkei and is forthcoming in The Margins. She is working on a collection of short stories.