4321 - Duke Arts & OLLI: Creative Writing Workshops with Shelbi Polk

Course Description

Words can help us make sense of the world, challenge the stories we inherit, and imagine what might come next. In this three-session hands-on creative writing series, participants will explore three distinct forms of expression, from reshaping existing texts to envisioning new worlds to writing letters that make our voices heard. Together, these forms offer an invitation to experiment, create, and discover new ways to engage with ideas and with one another.

Blackout Poetry - Any time you read someone else's words, you enter a conversation with them. Even if you never speak to the writer, you get to engage with their work on your terms. Blackout poetry, also called erasure poetry, makes that conversation explicit. Poets working in this methodology remove pieces of a text to create a new meaning, and the process has often been turned to political statements. In this workshop, we will study the work of poets like Tracy K. Smith and Billy Ray Belcourt for inspiration. Then, we will engage with idealistic early documents from America's founding and something new with them, something that reflects our lived experience of the country.
Speculative Fiction - Civil Rights activist Marian Wright Edelman said that you can't be what you can't see. Speculative fiction (a handy term for any kind of writing that deals with not-strictly-realistic worlds, including fantasy and science fiction) writers often spin that imagination out across societies and centuries. Writing in a speculative mode allows us to imagine new and different ways of being in community, or to explore methods for bringing that future about. In this workshop, we'll look at the hows and whys of fiction that reimagines society, and then we'll try our hands at writing some of our own.
Letter Writing - It's possible that the practice of writing letters was invented by a Persian queen five centuries BCE. Whatever their origin, letters have been used to maintain individual relationships and effect societal change. In this workshop, we'll look at a few of these campaigns, but we'll spend most of our time drafting our own. Our voices matter, and we deserve to make them heard.

Shelbi Polk is a writer and artist who has been embroidering since her childhood in Texas. She moved to the Triangle nearly a decade ago to write for the newspaper and stayed to get her MFA from NCSU. Shelbi covers books and literary culture for local and national outlets while working on her first novel. When she isn't writing from a Durham coffee shop, you can probably still find her in a Durham coffee shop, chatting with the other regulars.

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4321 - 001

Fall 2026

Available

Duke Arts & OLLI: Creative Writing Workshops with Shelbi Polk

Classroom

11:00AM to 12:30PM

Oct 12, 2026 to Oct 26, 2026

Schedule and Location

View Details

4.5

Durham - Duke University

tuition non-credit

$75.00