Workshop Series: Over the Prairie//Under the Prairie with Lily Lalios *IN PERSON*

An in-person workshop series with 2026 Milwaukee Emerging Poet Practice Fellow Lily Lalios

Free and open to the public, but registration is required (please see below).

Lily Lalios is a writer based in Milwaukee who has been published by #EnbyLife journal, Pitymilk Press, and VA Press. They also produced Apagimeni Literary Magazine, a compilation of poetry, essays, and visual art by and about the queer Greek American experience. Lily’s work made the long list for the 2024 SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction, and they were a finalist for the 2025 Genrepunk Haunting Award. Currently, Lily is also a member of the writing team for Cabaret Milwaukee, a theatre troupe that performs radio dramas about Wisconsin history.

Lily’s project Over the Prairie//Under the Prairie is a yearlong series of free community poetry workshops, culminating in a print anthology. These generative workshops, designed for Milwaukee residents and writers of all experience levels, will explore one or more of the project’s four major themes; Grief and Death practices, Local Eco-Writing, Interfaith/Intercultural Memory-Keeping, and Ekphrastic Poetry. Workshops will be held at various locations around the city in order to offer site-specific inspiration related to the theme, as well as to allow participants to explore their city and meet neighbors they might not otherwise encounter. 

Workshops are free and open to the public, and participants are welcome to come to as many or as few as they like. Please register for each session in which you plan to attend. While these themes are sure to inspire highly personal and vulnerable work, participants are welcome to submit their generated works to the community anthology, which will commemorate the project and serve as a testament to the importance of collective grieving and the cathartic power of poetry.

Lily will receive administrative support from our staff, along with a $1,500 project budget to carry out their vision.

Wed. Apr. 8 | 6–8 pm CDT @ Woodland Pattern: Write It True

Workshop participants are invited to transform grief for the present into optimism and action for the future. Engaging with the Radical Imaginary, we’ll write “Autobioracle” Poetry (autobiography + oracle) to remember that it is possible to see ourselves in a better world. Let’s practice thinking about the people we will grow into, and the community we could grow into. 

Wed. May 6 | 6–8 pm CDT @ Woodland Pattern: The Paved Prairie

In this ecology-focused workshop, we’ll observe the plants around the Woodland Pattern building for ideas about character, categorization, and conflict, casting the plants that poke up through the sidewalks as heroes against seemingly insurmountable odds. Is a Prairie still a Prairie if there’s a City on top of it? Who decided the difference between “flowers” and “weeds”? Participants will peek beneath the Urban Overlay for inspiration. We’ll write poems that consider the relationship between the land and those that walk on it, discussing things like city planning and landscaping, the prioritization of roads and cars, and sources of noise, air, and soil pollution.

Sat. Jun. 6 | 2–4 pm CDT @ Charles Allis Art Museum: A Thousand Words (1801 N. Prospect Ave., Milwaukee)

Ekphrastic poetry is any poetry responding to a visual work of art, such as painting, sculpture or photography. In this workshop, we will explore ekphrasis in relation to a family photograph or heirloom. We invite participants (and family members if possible) to bring memory objects to the Charles Allis Art Museum to write poems inspired by these objects and the stories they tell.

Sat. Jun. 20 | 2–4 pm CDT @ Charles Allis Art Museum: The Good Death (1801 N. Prospect Ave., Milwaukee)

If you could choose all the details, how would you want to experience the end of your life? These conversations are often emotional and intimidating, but using poetry as a tool to meet death in the abstract, participants will be able to contemplate, verbalize, and advocate for their ideal end-of-life care. Workshop participants will take inspiration from the historic Charles Allis Art Museum to contemplate the Victorian concept of The Good Death and the changes in American practices around death in the last 150 years. Additional resources from Greater Milwaukee Death Doulas will also be provided.

Sat. July 18 | 2–4 pm CDT for HOME Family Workshop Day @ Lynden Sculpture Garden: Move Your (Poetic) Feet (2145 W. Brown Deer Rd., River Hills, WI 53217)

Milwaukee is a city defined by its many waves of ethnic migration. In a non-exhaustive list, this includes Potawatami, Anishinaabe, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Oneida, and Mohican nations, German, Scottish, Irish, Polish, African-American, Italian, Jewish, Slovak, Latine, Greek, Hmong, Rohingya, Yemeni, and many more. The music, rhythms, and melodies of these lineages remain deeply encoded into the artistic instincts of those to whom they belong. What music do you think of as “yours” and what rhythm does it possess? Come take the rhythm of the music you love and let it guide the meter of your poetry! Hosted at Lynden Sculpture Garden as part of their HOME Family Workshop Day.

Sat. Sept. 19 | 2–4 pm CDT @ Lynden Sculpture Garden: Tell Me Again (2145 W. Brown Deer Rd., River Hills, WI 53217)

In this sixth and final Over the Prairie//Under the Prairie workshop, participants will write down a family story or legend they’ve heard repeated throughout their lives, then rework the critical elements of that family story into their chosen poetic form (haiku, black-out poem, pantoum, prose poem). In an especially short form like a haiku, what words evoke the tale as a whole rather than literally relaying the facts? How does a black-out poem or its original prose reveal familial stylistics? How does the pantoum reflect the way stories are passed down and down again? We will begin our exploration of these forms by walking Lynden artist-in-residence Jenna Knapp’s labyrinth installation.

About the Milwaukee Emerging Poet Fellowship program: Drawing inspiration from both the Mary L. Nohl Fund Emerging Artist Fellowship and the Poetry Project’s Emerge Surface Be program, Woodland Pattern established the Milwaukee Emerging Poet Fellowship program in 2022 to bring greater visibility and much-needed early support to Milwaukee poets through mentorships, access to opportunities that encourage a poet’s practice and development, and investment in literary projects for which younger poets frequently lack resources. The Milwaukee Emerging Poet Fellowship program also seeks to make available alternative avenues of support for emerging poets outside traditional academic-track poetry programs and environments. This initiative is open to Milwaukee poets between the ages of 20 and 35, who are not currently enrolled in an MFA or PhD program.