Amanda Gorman

Amanda Gorman (born March 7, 1998, in Los Angeles) is an American poet and activist who became known worldwide in January 2021, when she read a poem at Joe Biden's presidential inauguration. She writes in English, and her work deals with oppression, feminism, race, marginalization and the African diaspora. Her case matters because it brings written poetry into a public, institutional setting, a space where verse rarely appears today.

She grew up in Los Angeles, raised by her mother, Joan Wicks, an English teacher, together with her two siblings. Her twin sister, Gabrielle, is an activist and filmmaker. As a child she had a speech impediment and an auditory processing disorder that made her sensitive to sound. She has said the difficulty became a strength: it pushed her toward reading and writing, which her mother encouraged. She has also described using songs from musicals as speech practice to master the hard R sound.

She attended New Roads, a private school in Santa Monica, and then studied sociology at Harvard, graduating in 2020. Her reputation as a poet grew while she was still a student. In 2014 she was named the first youth poet laureate of Los Angeles, and in 2017 she became the first person to hold the title of National Youth Poet Laureate, chosen from five finalists. That year she also became the first author featured in the XQ Institute's monthly book list and opened the Library of Congress literary season. Her first poetry book, The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough, appeared in 2015. In 2016 she founded One Pen One Page, a nonprofit offering writing and leadership programmes for young people.

Her breakthrough came with The Hill We Climb, read at Joe Biden's inauguration on January 20, 2021. At twenty-two she became the youngest poet ever to read at a presidential inauguration. After the storming of the Capitol on January 6 she revised parts of the poem to address those events. A book edition followed soon after, with a foreword by Oprah Winfrey, and reached the top of several bestseller lists. The National Football League later commissioned a poem for its season opener in February 2021, and she wrote a tribute to Black athletes for Nike.

Her verse combines clear, rhythmic language with an openly public purpose, which has earned both admiration and debate. The translation of her poem into Dutch and Spanish caused controversy: her agency sought translators with a specific profile, and in 2021 the Dutch writer Marieke Lucas Rijneveld stepped down from the assignment after criticism. Her legacy lies in showing that poetry can accompany collective moments in political life, and in making a young Black woman's voice central to that role. In 2021 she also published the collection Call Us What We Carry, which critics received well.