Poetry of Place

Program Description

Patterson visits schools for a one-day workshop where she introduces students to the basic concept of poetry, then leads them through the process of writing a place poem about the area in which they live, highlighting the sensory details—the sights, sounds, taste, textures, and smells of their particular place. Each student will be able to produce a poem based on their experience of area campgrounds, rivers, and backyards. Patterson also talks to teachers about how selected poems can later be published by their schools or classrooms for school bookmarks, along with a selected photograph or illustration of the area.

Presenter Bio

Caroline Patterson is the author of The Stone Sister, winner of the Big Moose Prize from Black Lawrence Press, which won for the 2022 High Plains award for women’s fiction and was a Montana Library Association honor book. She published the collection, Ballet at the Moose Lodge, a literary anthology Montana Women Writers: A Geography of the Heart and two children’s books on the natural world.

Her work has been included in anthologies including A Million Acres, Montana Noir, Bright Bones, and The New Montana Story. A graduate of the University of Montana creative writing program in fiction, she was awarded the Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Fiction at Stanford University and in 2022 was awarded a 2021 Montana Artists Innovation Award. She is the executive director of the Missoula Writing Collaborative