“…For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it.” On January 20th, 2021, the Inauguration Day of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Amanda Gorman’s words boom through the microphone, reaching the audience present and the millions of viewers at home. She wears a sunflower yellow suit jacket; her braids have been brought back into a large bun accessorized with golden beads and a wide, gorgeous vermillion headband. In the light of the sun, her gold jewelry glints and shimmers, including the hoop earrings gifted by Oprah herself. In the days that followed her inspired reading, Gorman’s followers on her social media would increase by hundreds of thousands almost every hour, with her Instagram going from 50 thousand to 2 million followers on Inauguration Day alone. But how did Amanda Gorman become the youngest inaugural poet in history? What was her journey, from her school years to now? Does she have any other works? We’ll explore all of these things, and what we can expect to see from the 22-year-old poet laureate in the future.
Amanda S. C. Gorman was born on March 7, 1998, in Los Angeles, California to a single mother, Joan Wicks. She has a twin sister, Gabrielle Gorman, also an incredibly creative mind; she is a filmmaker and digital artist. According to the New York Times, her mother kept the TV off most of the time, giving the children the opportunity to use their imagination while building forts, reading books, and playing outside. Because Wicks was also a teacher, she emphasized reading and writing and taught the children at a very young age, helping to develop Amanda’s love for literature. As Gorman told the Harvard Gazette, she has an auditory processing disorder, causing her to “hear and process information differently from other people”. She also had a speech impediment and had to go to speech therapy, making her early school years quite difficult. She didn’t let this stop her, though: rather, she saw it as a strength, a superpower, allowing her to further delve into the world of reading and writing and develop advanced skills.
Gorman claimed that at age five, she realized that what she was reading in books and writing in her notebooks was the “voice she really wanted for herself”. According to a New York Times article, she first wanted to become a poet in third grade, when her teacher read Ray Bradbury’s novel, “Dandelion Wine”, to the class. A metaphor struck Gorman—“I don’t remember what [the metaphor] was exactly—something about candy—but I lost my mind. It was the best thing I’d ever heard. Pure magic!” Gorman revealed that the author that really helped her find her voice was Toni Morrison, specifically her book The Bluest Eye: “I realized,” she remarks, “that all of the stories I read and wrote featured white or light-skinned characters. I’d been reading books without black heroines, which nearly stripped me of the ability to write in my own voice, blackness and all.” Morrison’s diverse characters allowed Gorman to develop a distinct, unapologetic, black feminist voice of her own, one that would be silenced no longer.
According to an article featured in the Harvard Crimson, Gorman attended New Roads School, a private K-12 institution known for its non-traditional curriculum and emphasis on social justice and creativity. Gorman expressed her gratitude for the school, as it had allowed her to really experiment with what she wanted to do when she grew up. In the Los Angeles Times, Shelly Fredman, the third-grade teacher who read “Dandelion Wine” to young Amanda, remembered the “precocious little girl who’d listen raptly to her class readings”. After watching the Inauguration, Fredman added, “If we do it right, they become the teachers”. Alexandra Padilla, Amanda’s 10th grade English teacher, also spoke of her former student’s pure passion. After reading Sandra Cisneros’ “The House on Mango Street”, Gorman had written a poem inspired by the novel’s unique style. Padilla still had the poem, and talked about Gorman’s ability to analyze Cisneros’ writing enough to absorb it and write her own iteration. Keren Taylor and Michelle Chahine Sinno, the founder of and a mentor for WriteGirl, an organization connecting young writers with mentors, also got their chance to work with Amanda. Both were emotional after the Inauguration, Sinno proudly stating that she remembered giving the young poet a Maya Angelou book to grow her poetry knowledge. Now, Amanda was following in Angelou’s footsteps as an inaugural poet, even wearing a ring gifted by Oprah Winfrey of a caged bird, a reference to Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”.
But Inauguration Day was not her poetic debut. In 2014, Gorman was named the first youth poet laureate of Los Angeles, allowing her to share her talent with the people in her city. A year later, she was named the Youth Poet Laureate of the West, putting her in the running for National Youth Poet Laureate, which she was awarded in 2017 while a sophomore at Harvard University. She has written many different poems for many different occasions, including one as a tribute to black athletes for Nike, and another, “Earthwise”, about the climate crisis. She also presented a poem at the Library of Congress, according to the Harvard Crimson, commemorating the inauguration of Tracy K. Smith as the National Poet Laureate. A Baltimore Sun feature mentions that Gorman has also secured a deal with Viking Children’s Books for two books, the first of which, “Change Sings”, will come out later this year.
What can we expect from 22-year-old Amanda Gorman in the future? As the National Youth Poet Laureate and youngest inaugural poet, the sky’s the limit. According to many sources including Gorman herself, her next goal is to run for president in 2036. “I always say the really, really long-term goal, meaning 2036, is to become president. So that’s the longest-term goal I have, which means I do want to become a public servant,” Gorman stated in an interview with the Boston Globe. She also hopes to publish works that aren’t poetry, and to run for a political position in her native Los Angeles. Amanda’s just getting started, as she alludes to in her poem “In This Place (An American Lyric)”: “…it is here, it is now, in the yellow song of dawn’s bell, where we write an American lyric we are just beginning to tell”.