The Business of Poetry
The working poet - what nobody tells you about organising your poetic practice, and the poetry it inspires.
* This course will take place on the video-conferencing platform ZOOM *
Part practical, part creative, we’ll explore how you actually work as a creative? How do you do your taxes as a freelancer? How do I invoice? What ways do you make money as a writer? What about balancing working and writing – how do you make time for anything?
We’ll guide writers on developing and protecting their creative practice while making a living, offering real actionable advice and templates on staying organised and working as a writer.
We’ll also draw inspiration from contemporary and past writers to see how they make/made it work. We’ll write our own poems about our daily rituals and necessary admin as response to, in defiance of, or to escape from them.
Poets we’ll explore include Audre Lorde, Maya Angelou, T.S. Eliot, and Nina Mingya-Powles, among others.
Christy Ku has been a creative freelancer since 2018 and has been delivering practical advice to creatives for several years. She is most known for this pay what you can/free guide to freelance taxes (https://ko-fi.com/s/cf832bc33e) and has delivered workshops on freelance taxes to organisations such as I Like Networking, Push the Boat Out Festival, Barbican Young Poets, and Care to Culture. She is passionate about ensuring creatives understand the practical administrative side of their work in order to protect themselves. Each year, she publishes a breakdown of how she makes a living as a creative freelancer: https://substack.com/@christyku/p-193693678.
1 x half-day Zoom session, running 10.30am–1pm (BST), on 10 Oct 2026.
Concessions & Accessibility
To apply for a concession rate, please send relevant documentation showing your eligibility for one of our concessions to [email protected]. Conditions of eligibility are detailed here. If you have any questions or wish to be added to the waiting list of a sold-out course, please email [email protected].
What to Expect
Please check the left hand side of this page for information on how this course works in practice, under the heading ‘Course Style‘. If you’re unsure as to what any of the terms there mean, or if this course is a good fit for you, please visit our What to Expect page which includes some further information on how our courses function.
Image credit: @designdrunkard
About Christy Ku 
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Christy Ku is a London based poet, playwright, actor, and workshop facilitator. Her work focuses on empowering creative confidence for all, across different industries and backgrounds.
She is a James Berry Poetry Prize 2024 commended poet. Christy has performed on Benjamin Zephaniah’s BAFTA award winning TV show ‘Life and Rhymes’ and was chosen by Simon Armitage to perform at his Freedom of the City of London Award and at Latitude Festival 2025. Her debut play was long-listed for the Women’s Prize for Playwriting 2025.
She has worked with organisations including the BBC, Sky Arts, Apples & Snakes, Science Museum and the Barbican on projects such as poetry films, spoken word tracks, and theatre shows. Christy is an alumna of the Barbican Young Poets, New Earth Actors Academy, National Youth Theatre, Southbank New Poets Collective, and Royal Court Theatre Playwriting Group. She is the founder of BESEA Poets, a platform for British based East and South-East Asian poets.
Christy has been published with Macmillan Children’s Books, Pan Macmillan, Own It!, Magma Poetry, the Barbican, Potluck Zine, Spoonfed, The Dark Horse Magazine, The North, Frontier Poetry and more. She was once rejected from having a poem baked onto 200 loaves of bread.
Christy is currently working on her DYCP for playwriting and is seeking a publisher for her debut poetry pamphlet.
"Excellent workshop. The exercises and example poems were excellent and we had great prompts. I surprised myself with what I wrote. The tutor was well prepared, gave us generous amounts of time to do the exercises and facilitated the group really well."
The Practice of Poetry with Shazea Quraishi
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Pathways through Poetry: Module 1 [Autumn 2026]