2026 Writer's Workshop
Writing and Place
February 19 - February 22, 2026 | Prose or Poetry Classes | $978
Experience a four-day workshop with award-winning Kentucky authors, Silas House, most recent Kentucky Poet Laureate, and Kathleen Driskell, current Kentucky Poet Laureate. This intimate opportunity to develop your writing skills will include overnight accommodations, meals, breakout sessions and musical performances along with nature and curatorial experiences unique to Shaker Village.
The workshop will include two paths: Prose or Poetry, led by longtime friends and experienced teachers Silas House (prose) and Kathleen Driskell (poetry), who both consider themselves writers of “place,” and have particularly deep connections to Kentucky and other landscapes which feature in their prose and poems.
Attendees will explore and develop their prose or poetry during workshops, readings, craft lectures, and more. Where better to consider the power of writing and place than at Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill.
A native of Eastern Kentucky, Silas House is The New York Times bestselling author of seven novels (Clay's Quilt, A Parchment of Leaves, The Coal Tattoo, Eli the Good, Same Sun Here, Southernmost and Lark Ascending, which was a Booklist Editors' Choice and is the winner of the 2023 Southern Book Prize and the 2023 Nautilus Book Award). Four of his plays have been produced. House teaches at Berea College, where he is the National Endowment for the Humanities Chair, and at the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Creative Writing. In 2023, he was inducted as the Poet Laureate of Kentucky for 2023-2025 and became a Grammy finalist.
Award-winning poet, essayist, and teacher Kathleen Driskell has authored six poetry collections, most recently Goat-Footed Gods. Other collections include Blue Etiquette: Poems, a finalist for the Weatherford Award; Next Door to the Dead, winner of the Judy Gaines Young Book Award; and Seed Across Snow, a Poetry Foundation national bestseller. She is professor of creative writing and Chair of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, where she lives with her husband in an old country church built before the American Civil War. On April 24, 2025, Governor Andy Beshear appointed Kathleen as the 2025-26 Kentucky Poet Laureate.
