‘The reason we can’t breathe’: Nashville Youth Poet Laureate takes on book bans and arming teachers

Nashville Youth Poet Laureate Jadyn Marshall doesn’t shy away from her frustrations with Tennessee policymakers. Her writing confronts topics like books bans, arming teachers and silencing young people.

At the annual State of Metro address on Tuesday, 18-year-old Marshall took the stage before Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell. While his speech would adopt a hopeful tone, touting the accomplishments of his administration thus far, Marshall’s delivery went in a different direction.

We look to ban books instead of teaching kids to read.
Focus on arming our teachers rather than aiming our children in the right direction to succeed.
Mother Tennessee — you’re overprotective of your children, not realizing that you’re the reason we can’t breathe.

Listen to Marshall’s full performance here:

After the address, Marshall said she finds poetry to be a space where her voice can be heard — and that’s something that’s not always available to youth. She points to the marches at the state capitol.

“It’s not a sense of, ‘Oh, why are they marching?’ ” Marshall said. “It’s more of a sense of, ‘They shouldn’t be marching,’ or, ‘They need to be back in school.’ ”

This inspired her to tackle certain topics head on.

“It was really important that I put that in there with like ‘silence, silence silence,’ because it’s something that as kids we hear a lot,” Marshall said. “It’s like, ‘You have to be quiet!’ And no, we don’t. We can still be great children and be loud and boisterous and express our emotions.”