OPPORTUNITIES
Call for Applications: Milwaukee Emerging Poet Fellowships
Woodland Pattern is accepting applications for the fifth year of its Milwaukee Emerging Poet Fellowship program. We are excited to offer awards in two categories. Each will run from January 2027 through December 2027. The application deadline for both categories will be November 1, 2026.
Eligibility: Open to Milwaukee poets between the ages of 20 and 35, who are not currently enrolled in an MFA or PhD program.
Practice Fellowship: The Practice Fellowship category seeks to support an emerging poet in their writing practice through an 8-month long mentorship with an established poet. Mentor and fellow will meet monthly one-on-one to workshop writing, discuss poetry and poetics, and explore publication opportunities. Meetings will take place in person and virtually. During the fellowship period, the recipient will also receive a $500 book allowance, may attend any Woodland Pattern workshop free of cost, and will be invited to give a culminating reading. Poets with existing manuscript projects are particularly encouraged to apply in this category. This year’s mentoring poet will be Sean Enfield.
Mentor bio: Sean Enfield is an essayist, poet, gardener, bassist, and educator. His debut essay collection, Holy American Burnout!, was published by Split/Lip Press in December 2023 and was a finalist for the CLMP Firecracker Award and winner of the Writer’s League of Texas Discovery Prize in Nonfiction. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, where he served as the editor in chief of Permafrost Magazine. Now, he serves as an assistant nonfiction editor at Terrain.org. You can find more of his work at seanenfield.com.
Project Fellowship: The Project Fellowship category seeks to support an emerging poet in need of financial and administrative support for an ambitious literary project such as a reading series, small press, literary journal, or interdisciplinary exhibition. Both new and existing projects are eligible for consideration. The recipient will receive ongoing support from our staff, along with a $1,500 project budget. Poets with a track record in DIY literary publishing and programming are particularly encouraged to apply in this category.
Drawing inspiration from 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 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.
Call for Applications: 2026–27 Milwaukee Youth Poet Laureate Competition
The search for Milwaukee’s next Youth Poet Laureate will begin on December 1, 2026, with the opening of submissions!
Eligibility: Applicants must be a Milwaukee County resident or enrolled in a Milwaukee County High School, in either their freshman, sophomore, or junior year.
Application process: Submit 5 poems + a CV outlining extracurricular activities, volunteer work, and/or academic honors on March 28, 2027. Finalists will be selected to compete at a juried event in May.
The Milwaukee Youth Poet Laureate (MYPL) program was established in 2022 to identify and mentor powerful youth poets with a history of civic and community engagement. The program is equally invested in supporting Milwaukee students and educators through free workshops and curricula that combine critical thinking and creative writing. This program is made possible in part with support from the Amazon Literary Partnership, the Milwaukee Public Library, and the MPS Foundation for the Arts & Humanities.
We acknowledge that in Milwaukee we live and work on traditional Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, and Menominee homelands along the southwest shores of Michigami, part of North America’s largest system of freshwater lakes, where the Milwaukee, Menominee, and Kinnickinnic rivers meet and the people of Wisconsin’s sovereign Anishinaabe, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Oneida, and Mohican nations remain present.
We further acknowledge the iniquity and suffering colonialism introduced to these lands ​through genocide and slavery, as well as through racist and xenophobic ​beliefs, laws​, and practices that continue to inflict harm upon Black, brown, Indigenous, and immigrant lives. We honor those who have lived—and live now—at these intersections of identity and experience.
347 E. Ward Street
Milwaukee, WI 53207
Phone: 414 263 5001
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