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 featured at a public reading event on July 8 at Literary Arts.
Katherine Cusumano (she/her) is a 2025 Oregon Literary Fellow in Nonfiction and the recipient of an Oregon Arts Commission Fellowship. Katherine is a reporter and essayist. Her writing about the intersections of pop culture and the outdoors has appeared in The New York Times, Outside Magazine, and other national publications. For her work, she has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, the Spring Creek Project, and Hypatia-in-the-Woods. She holds an MFA in nonfiction from Oregon State University and a BA in comparative literature from Brown University.
Q & A WITH LITERARY ARTS
What excites you the most about receiving an Oregon Literary Fellowship?
I moved to Oregon from New York three years ago to write, and this fellowship feels like it certifies me — as my closest friend back in Brooklyn texted me this spring—as an Oregon Writer. This fellowship offers motivation and encouragement that I’m going in the right direction, which are valuable in ways that are impossible to quantify, while the financial support allows me to do the legwork of research and reporting slowly and deliberately. I’m enormously honored to be in the company of other writers I know and admire and whose work I hope to keep reading forever.
How would you describe your writing process or creative practice?
I usually start with some kind of research question, or even more simply with noticing something weird in the world and wondering why it is or how it got that way. I’m interested in the objects of other people’s and communities’ obsession—especially when they’re outside of my own experience. I want to drop myself down a rabbit hole; I’m always looking for ways to get closer to my writing subjects. And coming from a background in journalism, I’m constantly calling people up. I love listening to experts explain things, but I also think that other people’s voices create such interesting textures in nonfiction. Lately, I’ve been looking for those textures in historical and archival sources, too. Digitized old newspapers are a gift.
What authors or books have shaped you the most as a writer?
I have stacks of books all around my home office that I turn to when I’m feeling stuck — uninspired, or hitting a research dead-end, or not quite solving a writing problem. Among them: Serious Face, a collection of reported essays by Jon Mooallem; A Little Devil in America, by Hanif Abdurraqib; The Unreality of Memory, Elisa Gabbert’s essay collection about disaster and time; Thrown, a bizarre immersion in the world of MMA fighters by Kerry Howley; and Animals Strike Curious Poses, by Elena Passarello (who was my grad-school advisor!). But in my pre-essay life, my reading diet consisted primarily of fiction, and I think as a result I’m still drawn to a certain density of prose and vividly rendered scenes.
Are there any Oregonian writers you look to for motivation or inspiration?
So many. My MFA cohort, all of whom still live in Oregon, and my writing group here in Portland. (Two writing group friends, Paige Thomas and Steven Moore, have books coming out next year — Paige, a debut collection of visual poetry, and Steven, a celebration of Janet Jackson, his third nonfiction book.) And then there are my grad school mentors, including Elena, Megan Ward, and Justin St. Germain.
What projects are you working on right now?
I’ve been spending a lot of time with local independent professional wrestlers for a reported essay I’m scheming up. I started watching professional wrestling by accident—I had some friends in Corvallis who were obsessed, real wrestling scholars—and quickly became fascinated by the tiers of the sport below the WWEs and AEWs of the world. The independent, freelance scene is far weirder and more permissive than what ends up on TV.
Do you have any advice for future applicants?
Keep it strange.
JUDGE’S CITATION
“Katherine Cusumano combines a journalist’s commitment to the archive and the artifact with an essayist’s flair for formal inventiveness and aesthetic play. In her essay ‘A Series of Still Frames Illustrating a Body in Motion’, Cusumano traces the complex aesthetic and visual history of how Western culture comes to ‘refer to something as natural.‘ In a series of twelve curated ‘snapshots’ that take the reader from the French Impressionists to Eadweard Muybridge’s stop-motion photography, from Werner Hertzog to Jordan Peele’s Nope, Cusumano ‘juxtapose[es] the natural world against what we might consider to be constructed or artificial,’ raising key philosophical questions about the tension between art as a medium for recording or for imaginatively expressing the ‘real,’ between authenticity and performance.”
– Ellen Wayland-Smith
