[3][4] Since 1995, Gotera has taught at the University of Northern Iowa, where he is a professor of English specializing in creative writing (both poetry and fiction) and multicultural American literature.

[5] Gotera is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Fighting Kite (Pecan Grove Press, 2007).

[8] In The Best American Poetry blog, Emma Trelles includes Fighting Kite among "a list of chapbooks well worth the read.

[13] Dragonfly (Pecan Grove Press, 1994) was Gotera's first poetry collection; critic Will Hochman called Dragonfly "a collection of poems that feels like a scalpel – in the book's cultural wingspan, Vince Gotera flies through Vietnam, rock and roll, terrorism and art with a voice that is iconoclastic, steely and real.

"[14] Gotera's work has appeared in such literary magazines as Ploughshares, Caliban, Amerasia, The Kenyon Review, The Asian Pacific American Journal, Zone 3, and others, as well as in anthologies like Contemporary Fiction by Filipinos in America, Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing, and From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900–2002.

[6] Gotera has also published a book of literary criticism titled Radical Visions: Poetry by Vietnam Veterans (University of Georgia Press, 1994.

Gotera's blog also features reprints from his 2004 book-review column in the Cedar Falls Times, titled "Of Books and Such."

At the University of Northern Iowa, Gotera won a Faculty Excellence Award from the College of Humanities and Fine Arts (2006).