Girls Write Nashville empowers expression through songwriting, production, mentorship and creative community for teen artists. The organization started nine years ago originally as a one-time community arts project. They ran a program where they paired nine middle school girls with nine local artist mentors to work together over a season of programming and, at the end, each girl was allowed to produce a song in the studio.
”I always joke that’s how nine middle school girls determined the next decade-plus of my life and my entire professional trajectory,” said Jen Starsinic, executive artistic director and co-founder of Girls Write. “We formed a nonprofit and we’re nine years later and have exploded in growth. Particularly, we are a trauma-informed organization that is working at this intersection of what are the needs of today’s young people? [It’s a] music education program that really focuses on creative agency, what impacts can that have particularly for teen girls.”
They will host House Concerts starting this Thursday (Aug 13) at 100 Taylor Nashville Arts Collective and will continue on September 24 with two more events in January and April of 2027. This is an intimate evening bringing together teaching artists and alumni of the organization with supporters, and those who want to learn more about Girls Write Nashville.
”We all spend 99.9% of our time at schools with our awesome youth artists, and we love that and that’s what we do,” Starsinic said. “But we also found that we’re really short on time to spend with the adult community of supporters that make a community organization nonprofit like ours work. ”We’re looking forward to hosting that community of supporters that we already have, but also anyone who just might be interested in Girls Write and be like, ‘I’ve always seen you guys, but I’m not a songwriter. I’m just a person out here who thinks it’s really cool, but I don’t know how I plug in.’
She continues: “They can come and we’ll have happy hour refreshments from Killjoy, our local non-alcoholic beverage shop, as well as Walker Brothers Kombucha and some snacks. One of our teaching artists does a short concert, and we all get to just have a nice happy hour concert of community and conversation, and then go eat some delicious dinner at Butchertown Hall afterward.”
Additional event opportunities start tonight (Aug 12) when WNXP Presents American Football at Marathon Music Works. On Thursday night (Aug 13) My Chemical Romance is at Nissan Stadium, and legendary soul singer Gladys Knight performs at Ryman. Another show at Nissan is on Saturday (Aug 15) with Foo Fighters & Queens of the Stone Age and TLC & En Vogue is at First Bank Amphitheater. Sunday night (Aug 16) Squeeze is at the Ryman and on Monday (Aug 17) there is rock.nite at Skinny Dennis.
