Amanda Gorman

Amanda Gorman (born March 7, 1998, Los Angeles, California, U.S.) gained international fame when she read her poem “The Hill We Climb” at the 2021 inauguration of U.S. Pres. Joe Biden. A poet and activist whose star has continued to rise, she is known for works that address Black identity, feminism, marginalization, and climate change.

Gorman and her siblings, including her twin sister, Gabrielle, were raised by a single mother, Joan Wicks, who was a middle-school teacher. The sisters both had difficulties with speech. Amanda had an auditory-processing disorder that made it hard for her to pronounce the letter r. By her own account, she sought out poetry as an inexpensive means of expressing herself.

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Inspired by Pakistani activist and future Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, Gorman became a youth delegate for the United Nations in 2013. The following year she was named the inaugural Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate. In that capacity she worked with the County of Los Angeles Commission on Human Relations to develop youth programs. She self-published her first collection of poetry, The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough, in 2015. Amanda enrolled at Harvard University in 2016, while Gabrielle pursued film studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, but the sisters found ways of collaborating, notably working on such projects as Rise Up As One (2018), a short film by Gabrielle about activism with Amanda reading a poem of the same title. In 2017, while still attending Harvard, Amanda Gorman became the inaugural National Youth Poet Laureate, and she toured the country reading new works, including “Earthrise” at the Los Angeles Climate Reality Leadership Corps Training (2018). Gorman graduated cum laude in 2020 with a degree in sociology.

(Read W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1926 Britannica essay on African American literature.)

In 2021 Gorman became one of only a handful of poets, including Robert Frost and Maya Angelou, to recite a poem at a U.S. presidential inauguration. She immediately captivated the audience with her poise and her stirring message. Gesturing elegantly and employing wordplay to great effect, Gorman addressed a country grieving the losses of the COVID-19 pandemic, shaken by George Floyd’s murder in 2020, and reeling over the Capitol insurrection a few weeks prior to the inauguration. These events exposed how division sowed violence, inaction, and discrimination. She rallied listeners not only to set aside differences and to unite but also to recognize that America was at a turning point when citizens must reckon with the country’s harrowing history to redeem its founding ideals:

[B]eing American is more than a pride we inherit—
It’s the past we step into, and how we repair it.

Gorman warned of the consequences of doing nothing, acknowledged her own presence at an inauguration as proof of the country’s ability to change, and finished with a call to look for inspiration in oneself:

For there is always light,
If only we’re brave enough to see it,
If only we’re brave enough to be it.

By the time Gorman uttered her last, satisfying line, she was a celebrity, lauded throughout the world for meeting the moment. In the following weeks she became the first poet to perform at the Super Bowl (her poem, “Chorus of the Captains,” honors an educator, a nurse, and a veteran). She also signed a modeling contract and published a special edition of her inaugural poem. Later in 2021 Gorman cohosted the Met Gala, the annual benefit for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, with actor Timothée Chalamet, singer Billie Eilish, and tennis player Naomi Osaka. In addition, she debuted a children’s book, Change Sings: A Children’s Anthem, and published a collection of poetry, Call Us What We Carry (formerly titled The Hill We Climb, and Other Poems). In 2023 Gorman published her second children’s book, Something, Someday.

(Read Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s Britannica essay on “Monuments of Hope.”)

In 2023 Gorman’s work became the center of a national discussion about book bans in schools and libraries after a complaint was filed by a parent at an elementary school in Florida who said that Gorman’s book The Hill We Climb was not educational, contained hate speech, and indoctrinated children. Administrators at the school reviewed the book and reshelved it from the elementary-reading-level shelf to the middle-school shelf, saying that the “vocabulary used in the poem was determined to be of value for middle school students.” The action was condemned by the “freedom to write” organization PEN America, which said that reshelving the book still restricted its access to young readers. For her part, Gorman tweeted on the social media site X that she was “gutted” by the school’s action, and she rallied others to speak out against book bans. She later elaborated in an interview with CBS Mornings:

I’m fine with those parents not liking my poetry, that’s completely in your right. But when we get to a situation where that one person’s dislike of my work leads to everyone else not having access to that, that is a huge issue…because it encroaches on our freedom to really absorb and love and enjoy literature from where we are.