Together with the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, the Center for Literary Arts at San Jose State University will present the 2022 John Steinbeck “In the Souls of the People” Award to Jacqueline Woodson, author of the 2014 memoir novel Brown Girl Dreaming. The award is given to writers, artists, thinkers, and activists whose work captures Steinbeck’s empathy, commitment to democratic values, and belief in the dignity of people who by circumstance are pushed to the fringes; and the phrase “in the souls of the people” comes from Chapter 25 of The Grapes of Wrath. Woodson is the recipient of a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship and the 2020 Hans Christian Andersen Award. Brown Girl Dreaming, a New York Times bestseller, won the National Book Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newberry Honor, and the NAACP Image Award. Woodson is also the author of Red at the Bone, a New York Times bestseller; Another Brooklyn, a 2016 National Book Award finalist; and books for young readers including Before the Ever After, The Year We Learned to Fly, The Day You Begin, and Harbor Me. The October 18, 2002 awards ceremony will take place at 7:00 p.m. in the Student Union Theater on the San Jose State campus in downtown San Jose, California. During the event Woodson will have an onstage conversation with Michele Elam, the William Robertson Coe Professor of Humanities at Stanford University. The 7:00 p.m. event is free.
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A worthy winner. It’s great that San Jose State has a Steinbeck award and Stanford one named for William Saroyan. Their careers paralleled now and then, including both winning the Pulitzer in the same year
It would be good to re-read Steve’s great piece in Steinbeck Now that was published June of 2021 titled: “The Time of Their Lives: William Saroyan, Steinbeck, and the Dollar Short Story”. Wonderful story of the two about an evening with Bruce and Jean Ariss, and a short story given to the Ariss’s that Saroyan wrote overnight after he left their home full of food, wine and pleasure.
As a note on the Pulitzer Prize. Indeed they both won the prize the same year but Saroyan turned his down stating that “he did not believe in awards in the arts” (from Steve Hauk, June 19,2020 article referenced above.)
Thanks Steve!!
Jim Kent
Jim,
thanks. That piece was picked up from SteinbeckNow and run by the Armenian Mirror-Spectator this June 23. This the address of the piece as they ran it, with full credit to SteinbeckNow: https://mirrorspectator.com/2022/06/23/the-time-of-their-lives-william-saroyan-steinbeck-and-the-dollar-short-story/
The Armenian Mirror-Specator around since about 1932. A distinguishedand brave journalistic history. By the way, a good frtiend, the Iranian Kurdish writer Ava Homa, was nominated for the Saroyan prize for her novel Daughters of Smoke and Fire.
Steve