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.
The deadline for the 2026 Oregon Literary Fellowships is August 8, 2025. Click here to read the guidelines and apply.
Vix Gutierrez (she/her) is a 2025 Oregon Literary Fellow in Nonfiction and the recipient of the Women Writers Fellowship. She has lived and learned in more than twenty countries, but her life as writer began in Portland. Her work has appeared in The Common, Subtropics, The Timberline Review, Nailed, and elsewhere. Her essay, ‘Dark Sky City’ was a notable in The Best American Essays 2021. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Florida.
Q & A WITH LITERARY ARTS
What excites you the most about receiving an Oregon Literary Fellowship?
Receiving an Oregon Literary Fellowship means the world. Quite literally, as in The World card in Tarot, which signifies completion of a cycle, integration, and new worlds opening. It almost feels mystical or mythical, especially considering that Oregon was the birthplace of my writing career. While I’d always felt compelled to write and dreamed of being an author, it wasn’t until I moved to Portland in 2015 that I made a solid commitment to writing-to-publish and took my first embodied step, joining a small weekly critique group. Sharing my work for the first time felt like being naked in public (another thing I’ve grown more comfortable with since).
But in the ten years that followed, as I deepened my commitment to writing, the structures and trajectory of my life changed and shifted until, by the time I applied for the fellowship in 2024, I was back in Portland, only now under completely different circumstances than when I’d lived there before. I had an MFA in writing, a notable in Best American Essays, and a finished memoir. I was also, for the first time in many years, living on my own, without a safety net, and feeling out for a foothold. When I learned that I had been selected as a 2025 Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship recipient, it felt like a cosmic wink, a full circle to a story that started in Oregon, what now feels like a lifetime ago.
The writing community in Oregon is just phenomenal, I would call it magic, but I know how much time, energy, and passion my fellow artists put into everything they do. It’s an honor, being a fellowship recipient, and a reminder, of how much I owe this community which has given me so much. It will be a lifelong pleasure, finding ways to pay it back, or better yet, pay it forward.
How would you describe your writing process or creative practice?
My writing process is a perfect blend of structure and chaos. Ideally, every morning, after dancing around in sweatpants, I sit down with coffee, open my laptop, and let fingers fly. By the time hunger brings me back into my physical space a few hours later, I look up, a bit disorientated, and it takes a bit to gather my bearings. But that’s just the “writing” part of it, more and more, I feel the creative process taking in everything, from the woman at Tabor Park who high-fives me when I step onto the trail, to the winding bark patterns on the trees, to the things I hear in podcasts or snippets of conversation on the TriMet bus. Viewing the creative process this way also allows me to take it easier on myself when I’m not in full-on “writing” mode, to relax and be present and allow myself to be surprised.
What authors or books have shaped you the most as a writer?
Hunter S. Thompson was my first literary hero. As a young journalism major who felt I was putting on a starched suit every time I tried to write according to the conventions, Gonzo Journalism excited me, it felt like permission to write my weird. And when he wrote about politics, he didn’t pander to power, didn’t hold back.
Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of Butterflies resonated with me in my early reading experience. The courage and resistance of the female protagonists, the way they managed to have impact and make personal choices in a world that constricted and squeezed from every side, redefined heroism for me, made empowerment and personal agency feel accessible.
Are there any Oregonian writers you look to for motivation or inspiration?
Ken Kesey was an early inspiration. I read Sometimes a Great Notion when I was in my early twenties and had only recently moved to the Unites States. I had never been to Oregon, much less worked in the logging industry, but something about his writing made me recognize myself in the thrashing rivers and dank woods, in the fierce drive for independence—I felt it all in my raging heart. Just now, as I went online to search for a quote that I remember only from its essence, I went down a trail of Kesey quotes that speak so specifically to current questions I’ve had as a writer of nonfiction; it feels like we’re having an ongoing conversation in real spiral time. For instance, when Kesey writes, “I could now (possibly) go back and restretch those shrunken hours, flake the images separate, arrange them in accurate chronological order, (possibly; with willpower, patience, and the proper chemicals) but being accurate is not necessarily being honest…”
Terah Van Dusen’s work is poignant, grounded, and profound. I admire her capacity for writing scenes that ground in time and place. At the same time, she writes with a depth of wisdom and a scope of vision that leaves me feeling connected to the pulse of something timeless and puts me at ease, somehow.
I am continuously awed and inspired by my contemporaries in Portland who blaze new trails in writing and publishing, who actively encourage connections by setting up reading events and writing groups, and who show up for open mics with such passion and generosity of spirit, the air crackles with electric charge.
What projects are you working on right now?
I’m now working on a second memoir based on events and experiences from recent years. I envision it as a three-part book, with the first part set in Florida, the second in Spain, and the third in Portland, Oregon. I am currently writing this from New York, however, and the vision may have to expand to accommodate a fourth part. Or maybe a third book. That’s the thing with writing nonfiction when you live your life as a story-in-progress—it can be hard to keep up.
Do you have any advice for future applicants?
Do it! The way I see it, just submitting/applying is a win. Every time you submit or apply is another step toward embodying your dream, another bet on yourself, no matter the results. Every now and then, some unfathomably wonderful news comes out of that submission, and then you look back to that moment where you almost didn’t submit and you’re so glad you did do it.
WRITING SAMPLE EXCERPT
from The Strange Dance of Pluto’s Moons
Part I
Double Planetary System
When Gladys tells the story of the day I arrive in the United States, she’ll say, There she was, the poor dear. Thin as a rail, lost, and in tears.
I won’t tell my aunt that the first time we meet—in the luggage terminal of the Phoenix airport, with its balding carpets and too-cold air conditioning—I am not in tears, but wide-pupiled and bleary-eyed from the drugs. By this point I’m sure it was drugs—slipped into a drink that last night out in Manila, somewhere between the strobe lights, the dancing, the deep-tonguing stranger, and the taxi ride to Ninoy Aquino International Airport.
This woman—my aunt—smiles at me without showing teeth. Like I’m a feral baby animal she doesn’t want to frighten. Her voice is soft, coaxing. She reaches for my bag as she asks about the plane ride.
I don’t tell her how my seatmate sucked his teeth with his tongue after the meal and kept at it even after the flight attendants had finished clearing all the meal trays—thssth, thssth. thssth, or how I closed my eyes and clenched my jaw and pressed my head against the headrest while the small sucking sound echoed through the hollow of my brain until even the engine seemed to join in on the beat—the wheels of the drinks cart and intercoms and Thsst, thssst, thsst, Ladies and Gentlemen, items in the overhead compartments may have shifted during flight, soon we will be landing in thsst thsst Phoenix, USA.
We won’t be staying in Phoenix; it took my aunt two hours to get here. The drive is two to two and a half, she says, depending on the traffic.
My aunt smells like mothballs, vanilla, sugar, shampoo. There’s a red speck of lipstick on her front right tooth. When I look again, it’s gone. It’s been forty hours since the club and still my senses are live wires.
The goosebumps on my arms flatten when we step through the ice-slab doors of Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, into the midday Arizona sun.
Lenny, my aunt’s husband, is old. Older than anyone I’ve ever seen up close, older than anyone I’ve ever lived with in all those homes all over the world. Uncle Lenny, he says, squeezing my hand too hard. He is wearing a Stetson hat and a striped shirt, buttoned all the way to the collar. His legs are jeaned and thin, his knees wide apart and pointing out in opposite directions, like lizard’s eyes. He hoists my worn grey suitcase into the trunk of their shiny Ford Explorer and says, What do you have in here, honey? A body?
What I have inside the suitcase is: clothes—some new, but mostly hand-me-downs—a hair brush, one pair of high heels that I wore to all the Go-Sees, a batter-crusted Joy of Cooking, a Bosnian business planner that I’ve filled with diary entries and story fragments, a farewell card signed by my friends in the Philippines, dirty laundry in a plastic bag, photo albums, pictures with faces cut out, a fake high school diploma, toiletries, my original Puerto Rican birth certificate pressed like a fragile flower between the stamped-up pages of an old Spanish passport, underwear, socks, a book called Secret Paths that I wrote with my sister to pass the Russian winter, and a stiff U.S. passport filled with blank pages. Finally, there’s the piece of paper that is responsible for this whole thing, a folded sheet of notebook paper, a handwritten list of pros and cons organized under the question: Leave?
In the ugly grey suitcase is everything I own. Uncle Lenny is joking, but in a way, he’s right: I do have a body in there.
JUDGE’S CITATION
“At the age of nineteen, Vix Gutierrez buys a one-way ticket from Manila to Phoenix to live with an aunt she has never met and where, she hopes, she might begin life afresh. In doing so, she breaks with the only world she has ever known: a peripatetic childhood spent inside a Christian doomsday cult with her parents and siblings, playing with her sisters at being “Heaven’s Girl,” or helping her brothers build booby-traps to catch the Antichrist. Gutierrez’s memoir, The Strange Dance of Pluto’s Moons, recounts her experience of re-entry into civilian life in suburban Arizona with humor, an outsider’s eye for the gorgeous and telling cultural detail, and deep compassion for both sides of her tragically sundered family— those she newly joins, as well as those she left behind.”
— Ellen Wayland-Smith
