Nashville Youth Poet Laureate Explores Love Through Literature

Violet Hansen performing a poem. Photo courtesy of Hansen.

Speaking at the 62nd Metro Address is nerve-wracking for anyone, especially when you have a physics test in the morning.

But that's exactly what makes Violet Hansen stand out.

She is 17, soft-spoken, and still figuring out the parts of herself that most people don’t even realize have names yet.

At the same time, she’s standing behind podiums, speaking to city leaders and nonprofit boards about empathy, mental health, silence and the kind of love that doesn’t always look like love when it first arrives.

“I’m the 2025 Nashville Youth Poet Laureate,” Hansen said. The title feels less like a label and more like a responsibility that keeps expanding the more she steps into it.

She’s been Nashville’s Youth Poet Laureate for almost a year now, but she still talks about it like it’s something she is growing into, not something she has fully arrived at. 

Hansen has always been a writer.

Before there were stages, microphones or interviews, there were notebooks. “I was always that girl that sat off during recess at the playground and just wrote,” she said.

Back then, it was pen and paper, short stories and rhyming lines. Nothing that needed to be read out loud.

“I never really did spoken word,” she said. “But I always did poetry on paper.”

That changed when Southern Word came to her school.

They hosted a poetry slam, and Hansen signed up without exactly knowing why.

“I didn’t memorize anything for that one,” she said. “I just did a poem, read it on stage. It was terrifying. I almost died because I had really bad social anxiety for a really long time.”

But something happened on that stage, something she didn’t expect.

“I just, actually, fell in love,” she said.

She joined Southern Word workshops at the Nashville Public Library. That’s where “How Do I Write a Love Poem?” was born. A piece that would eventually secure her as the NYPL after months of competition.

“It’s a poem called, How do I write a love poem?” she said. “That was my first, like, good one, I guess, and that’s the first one I kind of memorized.”

But the real story of the poem didn’t come from a performance or a stage. It came from a quiet moment in a workshop, when she sat staring at a blank page, trying to write about love. She just kept hitting a roadblock, frustrated that she was unable to express something that seemed so common. Finally, her mentor turned to her and said, “Well, that’s your first line.”

And it clicked.

“My parents didn’t have really good role models, so they were never really taughthow to parent. And I felt like growing up as a kid, I was never shown love… as much wasneeded for me to be able to know how to understand it and how to give it,” she said.

So she wrote from confusion, not confidence.

“How do I write the first line of a love poem?”

She wrote it again and again, using that question like a flashlight, trying to trace the shape of something she didn’t know how to name.

Her poem doesn’t treat love like comfort. It treats love like something tangled and sometimes sharp, something you learn by asking hard questions.

Hansen doesn’t write to escape reality.

She writes to confront it.

“I’ve had a lot of gun violence and school shooting poems,” she said. “I do a lot of mental health poems, because that's a really big thing that’s close to my heart… I do a lot about child abuse and family issues too.”

She doesn’t choose these topics because she has answers. She chooses them because sometimes asking is what keeps things from disappearing.

“She kind of has a quieter soft presence, but when she gets on stage, it’s just absolute power,” said Natalie Schilling, policy and advocacy associate at Advocates for Women And Kids Equality, an organization that partners with the NYPL every year at its annual fundraising gala.

Despite working with adults every day, Schilling is still more impressed with the work of the youth AWAKE platform.

“The way she speaks truth to power is exactly what we hope for in these young people… And by speaking on her authentic experience with gun violence, one which many youth share, she is speaking directly to the elected officials that her generation sit and watch as they stay idle,” said Schilling.

Hansen explained the approach to these sensitive topics isn't something that should be impressive, rather something that is a part of her obligation.

“If I didn't speak up about certain things… it just kind of becomes desensitized and normalized,” she said.

Desensitized.

That’s the word Hansen keeps coming back to.

“With the position that I have and the things that I'm able to go to and the people that I'm able to speak to, I almost feel like I have a responsibility to advocate for the kids my age and the youth of Nashville,” she said.

She doesn’t think poetry fixes things. She doesn’t write expecting solutions. She writes so people will stop pretending certain things aren’t happening.

“Things aren't ok, even though people try to color over it,” said Hansen. “It limits us.”

She has seen firsthand how poetry can make someone feel less alone, and how sometimes the simplest question, “How do I write a love poem?” can become a doorway into conversations people didn’t know how to start.

The accessibility of this art form not only allows for the metaphors and allegories to shine through in artistic ways, but also allows for broader appeal among the political elite that most of these poems are aimed at.

“Spoken word is a very powerful medium, art and advocacy go hand and hand. You can't have one without the other,” said Schilling. “Especially because it adds levels of interpretation that impact you so much more.”

Despite her weaving of words following grand narrative and literary structures, Hansen’s poetry never feels lofty enough to escape reality, a point that sticks out to many.

Hansen doesn’t rush to give her poems resolutions. She rarely ties up endings.

“How do I write a love poem, when it's for someone who's heart is vacant… when is it for someone who's unconditional love has conditions?”

She ends the poem there. Still asking. Still wondering. Still trying to write something true.

She doesn’t pretend she knows how to write a perfect love poem. But maybe that was never the point.

Maybe the poem is not about knowing. Maybe it’s about searching. Maybe you don’t solve it. Maybe you speak it.

“I don’t think a love poem has to fix anything,” she said. “I just think it has to tell the truth.”

This article was written by Zach Watkins