Zayneb Allak is a poet and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Edge Hill University. She publishes poetry and creative-critical writing and is interested in writing that defies expectations and categorisation. She’s currently working on a creative-critical project, Spider Poetics, that explores how writing ‘spiders’ into being, as well as uncanny themes such as privacy, darkness and the strangeness of our own voices. As a teacher of writing, she believes that everyone has a story to tell and that we can all find the right words to tell it.

Zayneb tells us about the creative writing workshops she is delivering for Lime as part of our Create.Connect.Unwind programme;

“The workshops explore how writing is about making contact with a reader and creating something that is in some way touching. To do that, writers need to be able to find their own voice (or voices) and speak freely, as themselves. We explored this in a recent workshop for Black History Month, thinking about how our real-life speaking voices connected to our writing voices. For me, facilitating a workshop is mostly about listening to the voices of the people taking part, and helping them to hear the poetry in it. There’s so much poetry in our own voices. The great thing about a poem is you hardly need anything to write one, not even a pen. It really is just a voice to an ear. You can write it and say it by heart. I think that’s something that’s available to everyone, if they want it.”