Next Conference

Date: Friday, Saturday & Sunday, April 26, 27 & 28, 2024
Place: Blue Harbor Resort, 725 Blue Harbor Drive, Sheboygan, WI 53081
Keynote: Nickole Brown
Theme: “Eco-Justice & the Poet’s Task”

This year’s conference includes optional activities, including an opportunity to submit poetry to the Poetry Walk and a tour of the Art Preserve at the John Kohler Art Center on Friday, April 26. Registration for the Art Preserve Tour will close on March 25.

About Nickole Brown

Nickole Brown received her MFA from the Vermont College, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. Her first collection, Sister, a novel-in-poems, was published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book, a biography-in-poems about her grandmother called Fanny Says, came out from BOA Editions in 2015 and won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry. The audio book of that collection came out in 2017.

She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council. She was an Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock for four years and was the co-editor of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series for ten. She’s taught at a number of places, including the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNCA and the Hindman Settlement School. She lives in Asheville, NC, where she periodically volunteers at a three different animal sanctuaries.

Since 2016, she’s been writing about these animals, resisting the kind of pastorals that made her (and many of the working-class folks from the Kentucky that raised her) feel shut out of nature and the writing about it. Her work speaks in a Southern-trash-talking way about nature beautiful, damaged, dangerous, and in desperate need of saving. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of these first nine poems, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. In 2021, Spruce Books of Penguin Random House published Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire, a book she co-authored with Jessica Jacobs, with whom she co-founded the SunJune Literary Collaborative. In 2024, she’ll be the Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University, and she teaches every summer at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program. Currently, she’s the President of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, an annual environmental literary festival set to launch in Black Mountain, NC, in October of 2025. Learn more on her website.

Reserving a Room

Blue Harbor Resort

We hope you will stay at Blue Harbor and have easier access to the early morning and evening activities. To book a room, use this direct link created for Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. Bring your significant other or find a roommate.

Guests can also call the resort at 1-866-701-2583 and refer to their group WI Fellowship of Poets Conference. The cutoff date for making reservations is March 25, 2024. Once the rooms have been filled or after the cutoff date, we will not be able to guarantee the discounted rate you have been offered.

Alternate Hotel Info

We hope you will stay at Blue Harbor and have easier access to the early morning and evening activities. Note that the rate of $179 per night applies to whether you are in a single or have 1, 2, or 3 roommates. But, if you are interested in alternate hotel options, see below.

La Quinta Inn by Wyndham, $103 per night
2932 Kohler Memorial Dr, Sheboygan
920-457-2321

Harbor Winds Hotel, $119 per night
950 S. Eighth St, Sheboygan
920-452-9000 or 855-516-1090

AmericInn by Wyndham, $132 per night
3664 South Taylor Dr, Sheboygan
888-992-9510

All rates based on single occupancy. Call for more info.

The WFOP holds a conference once a year, usually in late April or early May, with locations rotating around the state. Fifty to a hundred of the state's most passionate poets gather to engage in workshops, readings, open mics and book fairs. Distinguished poets are frequent guest speakers. Please check back here for more information, and consult our opportunities and resources pages for news of other activities.

The 2024 conference is being planned by Regional VP Ed Werstein and team in the East region. Please reach out to him if you have any questions or concerns at wersted@gmail.com.

Buy Our Swag

Show your support for WFOP with a tote, T-shirt or sweatshirt. Go to our swag site.

Highlights

Spring Conference 2023

Our spring conference was in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, at the Best Western Premier Waterfront. Featured poets were Amorek Huey and Nicholas Gulig, Wisconsin Poet Laureate. Oshkosh Poet Laureate, Tom Cannon, initiated a collaborative poem by writing the starting line on an easel and providing a bunch of markers. At the end of the conference, he shared the poem.

TGIF.
(A WFOP Collaborative Poem)

The work of poetry tears down walls
It preserves memories and emotions
It opens windows and hearts
Poetry burns down bridges
And builds new ones
Thrashing through jungles of noise and chaos
It leads us to treasures 
Of peace
Like rehabilitated homes shining new
After being abandoned too long
Tin Siding clicking in the wind like a reminder
Then the hard work of fixing and then the rest
Or starting over.   have a drink!
I hate work     TGIF
Thank goodness imagination frees 

there is something that doesn’t love a wall

The work of poetry opens us to make Connections 
and celebrate our humanity

Love let’s us remain here forever 
Watch moon and sun 
River and lake
Eyes mouth
Nature and artifice conspire 
To make the world 

Poetry is a sunrise of emotions 
That slides us into rapids
Backwater and quiet water. 
Poetry is an invidious litte creature
Slithering in the muck
Of the brain 
yet ready to spring forth and devour.
Taking our normal senses 
transfiguring them into divine

It is what we make what we create 
What We have begun
In the quiet moments in the cracks
Of the cerebellum  

The work of poetry is as quirky
As the new moon cafe
It’s fishing along the fox river during a poetry conference 

It’s a chartreuse truck abandoned 
Under the spring green
Of a newly budded willow

Poems can sweat tears

The work of poetry is
To open the hand, to lift the veil

Just as a woman lifts her skirt
To reveal she is a universe

Or not

Poetry is the camera
Of my soul

The work of poetry is play!

The work of poetry is answering the call
To the fire Circle of our shared humanity 

Twin personas one breath
Speaking with the want emptied 
By the desire - We are all set on fire
In the blazing
Aurora of our own experience 
Healed by love 

The words splinter shards pierce
The poems skin
Opus speaks to me I attend to what they say
And write it down 

Like the drawbridges of Oshkosh 
Poetry teaches me to cross and meet 
Teaches me like the mystery vegetable at lunch
Even the sever doesn’t know

The work of poetry is a scramble in the garden shed
For a shovel pointy enough to break 
The hard pan
Below the topsoil

We we poets are the scribes of today 
The memory keepers of tomorrow.