Youth Literary Arts Program – Poetry Camp

Youth Literary Arts Program – Poetry Camp is a five-day, inter-arts camp that includes daily writing prompts and activities, two hours of focused writing, and creative activities. Each day includes a light breakfast, a workshop with a guest artist, lunch, and a field trip. During the camp, participants spend time writing, working with poets and spoken word artists, actors, performance coaches, musicians, and visual artists, and taking part in a student-led community poetry reading and a performance before the community.

• Ages: 11–17 years old
• Schedule: Five-day camp sessions
• Price: Poetry Camp is free-of-cost and is offered completely free of charge to students.

Poetry Camp is part of Woodland Pattern's Youth Literary Arts Program, which offers year-round multi-arts education with a strong focus in the literary arts and after-school arts and literature programming to approximately 300 Milwaukee Public Schools students each year. Two inter-arts summer Poetry Camps are offered completely free of charge to students, and both weeks offer a very similar experience, with participants asked to choose only one week because space is limited. Poetry Camp is open to Milwaukee youth entering grades 6–12, and at the end of camp, each student receives an anthology of their writing and a $100 Woodland Pattern gift card to purchase books of their choosing to help build their personal libraries.

Since 1999, Woodland Pattern's Youth Literary Arts Program has worked with Milwaukee Public Schools, the Community Development Grants Administration, and youth-enrichment organizations like UWM Talent Search, and currently serves Riverwest Elementary School, Gaenslen School, and Hopkins Lloyd Community School students. Woodland Pattern is the administrator of the Milwaukee Youth Poet Laureate program and presents over 400 programmatic activities and events each year. Woodland Pattern holds an internationally recognized collection of approximately 25,000 titles of poetry, small-press literature, and ephemera, including the largest collection of haiku in North America and the largest Native American section in Wisconsin, and its collection of contemporary poetry is described as the most comprehensive of its kind available for purchase in the U.S.

Woodland Pattern's stated goals are to promote a lifetime practice of reading and writing; to serve as a forum and resource center for poets and other artists in its region; to encourage collaboration and exchange across the literary, sonic, and visual arts; and to act as a bridge between local and national communities of poets and other artists. The organization offers year-round educational opportunities in creative writing and related arts for people of all ages, and notes a commitment to building accessibility despite limitations of the physical location, including the ability to offer captioning services for online events and, with advanced notice, ASL interpretation for live events. Testimonials describe Woodland Pattern as “a welcoming, inviting, and invigorating place to be” and “a generator of imagination that connect[s] us to the arts and to each others' stories of humanity.”

Last updated March 1, 2026.