Nashville Teens Have Got What It Takes to be the Next Youth Poet Laureate!

Yes that's right! This Saturday, three students from Nashville High Schools will compete for the title of Youth Poet Laureate of the City of Nashville. Go get 'em Cassidy Martin, Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay, and Lemuel Robertson! More from The Tennessean:

War, abuse and stereotypes. Those are the topics of the poems by the three high school finalists in a competition designed to select Nashville’s first Youth Poet Laureate.

Cassidy Martin, 14, a freshman at Big Picture High School, Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay, 17, a junior at Hume-Fogg Academic Magnet High School, and Lemuel Robertson, 16, a sophomore at East Nashville Magnet High School, will compete at State of the Word on Saturday at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music.

The Nashville Youth Poet Laureate program aims to identify writers ages 13-19 who are committed to community engagement, diversity and tolerance. The Youth Poet Laureate will perform at numerous city events and receive a book deal from Penmanship Books.

“We generally forget to listen to what young people have to say as we create our world and create their worlds for them,” said Benjamin Hook, executive director of Southern Word, a nonprofit association that teaches spoken word in classrooms across Middle Tennessee as a tool to promote literacy, self-expression, public speaking and leadership. “It is really important for this group of people, this piece of our community, to have a space to share their thoughts and inform our world and shape how we think.”

The National Youth Poet Laureate program began in New York in 2008 by Urban Word, an affiliate of Nashville’s Southern Word, and the program has spread to five cities, with plans to expand to a dozen cities worldwide. “We are rare in the fact that we were able to then get the level of civic support — the mayor’s office, the Nashville library, the Metro Arts Commission and the Metro public schools — and get them all together as partners around this initiative,” Hook said.

Continue reading at The Tennessean.