This fellowship category seeks to support an emerging poet in their writing practice through a year 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.
Eligibility: Open to Milwaukee poets between the ages of 20 and 35, who are not currently enrolled in an MFA or PhD program.
Mentorship: The Milwaukee Emerging Poet Fellow in the Practice category will be mentored by Sean Enfield. Sean 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.
Application Instructions: Please submit 10 poems and a cover letter discussing your writing practice and reasons for seeking this fellowship. Poems may be submitted as either a manuscript or performance recording. Please submit all 10 poems in only ONE text document.
Deadline: November 15, 2026
ABOUT THE MILWAUKEE EMERGING POET FELLOWSHIPS: 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.
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