We’re thrilled to introduce the 2025 Oregon Literary Fellowship Recipients with individual features on our blog. Out-of-state judges spent several months evaluating the 400+ applications we received, and selected thirteen writers and two publishers to receive grants of $3,500 each. Literary Arts also awarded two Oregon Literary Career Fellowships of $10,000 each. The 2025 Fellowship recipients were recognized at the 2025 Oregon Book Awards Ceremony on April 28, and a public reading event featuring this year’s Fellows will take place on July 8 at Literary Arts.
Kaylee Young-Eun Jeong (she/her) is a 2025 Oregon Literary Fellow in Poetry and the recipient of the Writer of Color Fellowship. She was a 2024 Tahoma Literary Review Fellow at the Mineral School Artist Residency, and her writing has been featured in or is forthcoming from The Adroit Journal, Best New Poets, ONLY POEMS, Pleiades, and Poet Lore, among others. Kaylee has also received support from Fine Arts Work Center and Brooklyn Poets. She graduated from Columbia University in 2024 and works as a preschool teacher.
Q&A WITH LITERARY ARTS
What excites you the most about receiving an Oregon Literary Fellowship?
I’ve always felt really strongly about being an Oregonian. Oregon is my first, and so in some ways my truest, home. To be a part of a group of incredible Oregon writers honored by this award not only excites me because of the encouragement it provides, but also because I feel like a part of this state-specific writing community.
How would you describe your writing process or creative practice?
I would describe it as a practice of curiosity and confusion. Like what Keats talks about with negative capability—getting to live inside and even delight in your own bewilderment and mystery. Whenever I encounter something that clings to my mind and won’t let go—this could be a strange fact, a recurring dream, an overheard piece of conversation—I try to consider it from every angle possible, wondering why it haunts me. The goal isn’t clarity or conclusion, but more like what Larry Levis says: “To frame the unsayable, & mute the sayable.”
What authors or books have shaped you the most as a writer?
This is always such a difficult question but I think I have three primary writers I can say immediately—Larry Levis, Louise Glück, and Frank Bidart. The formal and thematic impulses of all three have given me so much permission to tend to my own natural impulses in my poetry. But I could say this also about Li-Young Lee, Marie Howe, Anne Carson, and so on and so on.
Are there any Oregonian writers you look to for motivation or inspiration?
Matthew Dickman has been one of my favorite poets since I first began to read poetry seriously, around when I was sixteen. Whenever I feel like I’m losing my sense of play or delight, I turn to him, as well as whenever I feel like I’m being too self-protective in a poem.
What projects are you working on right now?
I’m a little superstitious when talking about projects, but I’m working towards a manuscript tentatively titled Helplessness’ Child.
Do you have any advice for future applicants?
Just apply! Even if you feel under-qualified, or like your work hasn’t received enough external validation. I don’t have an MFA, I just graduated from college and am working a job completely unrelated to poetry/what I studied. I am grateful to Literary Arts for looking beyond these extrinsic things and seeing me for my writing first and foremost!
WRITING SAMPLE EXCERPT
JUDGE’S CITATION
“There’s something in these poems that feels like jazz; something that feels like the breath a saxophonist takes before a solo; something that can’t be summarized, only savored. Maybe it is the mercurial nature of Jeong’s confessional voice, one spliced with multiple temporal modes, rewarding turns, and intimate revelations that remind the reader that life is meant to be lived strangely. Jeong readily takes the reader through page-length sentences so crisp you’ll have to double-take. In the end, here is a poet with a breadth of thematic concerns and enough formal dexterity to echo well beyond the page.”
– Kweku Abimbola
Applications for the 2026 Oregon Literary Fellowships will open in June. The deadline to apply is August 8, 2025.
