Amanda Gorman
Amanda Gorman was born on March 7, 1998, in Los Angeles, California. Gorman attributes her strength as a writer to the speech therapy she had as a child and learning how to speak English through poetry, becoming aware of sound, pitch, and pronunciation. Gorman continued developing her writing skills with mentors from the nonprofit organization WriteGirl, going on to perform her work for WriteGirl, the Moth, and Urban Word.
At 16, Gorman was named the L.A. Youth Poet Laureate and later the first National Youth Poet Laureate in 2017. In 2021, she became the youngest poet to write and perform her work, “The Hill We Climb”, at President Biden and Vice President Harris’ inauguration. The poem was finished the morning of the inauguration, drawing on the recent threat to democracy in the form of the Capitol insurrection and calling on people to create a better future.
Inspiration
“I was writing it and trying to find a way to encapsulate what had gone on over the past four years … And then we had the insurrection at the Capitol. For me, it was trying to say: we’ve had this reminder of the ways in which democracy is both fragile and also enduring, and how necessary it is to defend it. And I think a lot of times in cultures, we think of the ways in which we can cleanse ourselves with water. I think of the ways that we can cleanse ourselves with words, meaning that this poem was an opportunity to re-sanctify, re-purify, and reclaim not just the Capitol Building, but American democracy and what it stands for.”