This article explores the ways a team-taught course, “Public Poetry in a Digital World,” supported community-building through participatory action and digital creative making. Using digital texts responding to current events, this course fostered students’ civic imagination and invited them to make connections among their own lives, their communities and poetic civic media. This class facilitated critical community engagement through digital pedagogy and final projects in which students performed public scholarship. Ultimately, this course serves as a case study of how teaching born-digital texts with digital tools can expand the capacity of the creative writing classroom