Editor’s note: Like many people across the country, we at 2e News were blown away by 22-year-old Amanda Gorman’s recitation of her poem at the presidential inauguration this week. In printing an article about Gorman, we do not mean to suggest that Ms. Gorman is or isn’t twice-exceptional, only to celebrate her clearly exceptional contribution to our nation’s discourse at this critical time in history. She is a testament to the power and promise of our young generations.
There’s a new day in America and its first light has come from the shining words of 22-year old Amanda Gorman. Among the many memorable parts of President Joe Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday, Gorman’s recitation of her poem, “The Hill We Climb,” stood out as a ringing clarion call of hope.
After seeing Gorman’s reading at the Library of Congress of her poem, “In This Place: An American Lyric,” First Lady Jill Biden encouraged her husband, then President-elect Biden, to invite the Los Angeles native and Harvard grad to give what many people now praise as one of the great inaugural poems. “The Hill We Climb” stands alongside Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright” (John F. Kennedy) and Maya Angelou’s “On the Pulse of Morning” (Bill Clinton) as not only capturing the fraught present moment but inspiring a fresh outlook on the future.
“Young people like her are proof that ‘there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it; if only we’re brave enough to be it,’” tweeted former president Barack Obama, quoting Gorman’s poem. Her fellow Angeleno, actress and director Regina King, added, “You captured the history of this country and what democracy should mean beautifully.”
Gorman discovered her poetic voice after being diagnosed with an auditory disorder that resulted in a speech impediment that affected her since she started talking. “I always saw it as a strength because I became really good at reading and writing,” she told the Harvard Gazette.
Feeling anxious about her voice, Gorman was often reluctant to read her poetry aloud. “Would the audience understand me?” she said in an essay in the Huffington Post. “Would they, like most people, wonder what foreign, exotic country I came from, and would I have to tell them that my accent wasn’t an accent at all, but a disability?”
Training her ear and her voice, Gorman would often get up early before school and read aloud from her favorite books by J.K. Rowling, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and particularly Ray Bradbury, whose Dandelion Wine “reverberated” inside her. It’s a technique she used in preparation for her inaugural presentation, reading the poem aloud over and over in the days leading up to the event so the words could be “known in my mouth.” She still has the habit of dropping her r’s, saying “poetwy,” for example. “When you have to teach yourself how to say sounds,” she wrote in the Huffington Post, “when you have to be highly concerned about pronunciation, it gives you a certain awareness of sonics, of the auditory experience.” Eventually, with a lot of work, she gained confidence. “I learned that writing wasn’t about pronunciation, but about style and the author’s voice. I learned that poetry is voice, and the courage to use it. With this courage, we free ourselves and become capable of influencing others.”
As a huge Hamilton fan, Gorman included a reference to the groundbreaking musical in “The Hill We Climb” with the line, “history has its eyes on us.” Gorman developed confidence in her voice by rapping along with Leslie Odom Jr. during his rapid fire song “Aaron Burr, Sir” on the soundtrack album. She knew that if she could train herself to do that song, she could recite her own work. Hamilton has been “so huge a part of my own speech pathology, I included it in the inaugural poem,” she recently told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. Her reference didn’t go unnoticed by the show’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, who tweeted his praise to her, saying: “The right words in the right order can change the world. Keep changing the world, one word at a time.” That meant as much, if not more, to Gorman than anything else in her young career.
[perfectpullquote align=”left” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“I learned that writing wasn’t about pronunciation, but about style and the author’s voice. I learned that poetry is voice, and the courage to use it. With this courage, we free ourselves and become capable of influencing others.”[/perfectpullquote]
It’s been a short road but a steep one from her Watts neighborhood, an underserved community in Los Angeles where her mother works as a sixth grade teacher, and where Gorman “struggled against a shared identity” with her twin sister, to a prestigious private school, New Roads Academy, in Santa Monica, a much more upscale neighborhood. Driving back and forth to school, seeing the disparity within a few miles of one city, opened Gorman’s eyes and made her determined to apply her poetry to meaningful effect. A big influence on her was the stirring Nobel laureate speech given by another young prodigy, Malala Yousafzai. After that, at the age of 16, Gorman became a youth delegate to the United Nations. “It really opened my eyes to the possibilities of what I could accomplish,” she told The New York Times.
She began to get her poetry published when she was only fifteen years old, being named the Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate. In addition to the publication of her first collection, The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough, she founded One Pen One Page, a non-profit organization that encourages youth advocacy, leadership development, and poetry workshops. Inspired by social, economic, political, and environmental concerns, Gorman wanted to use poetry to raise awareness. “It’s not enough for me to write,” she said to the Harvard Gazette. “I have to do right as well.”
Her newest writing will be published this September, a children’s book, Change Sings, about a young girl on a musical journey to empower people to make changes in their world, their community, and themselves. She wrote the book, illustrated by Loren Long, so that young people could see themselves, she told The Los Angeles Times, as “represented as change-makers in history, rather than just observers.”
For now, though, as she goes about changing the world, Gorman is stuck at home, along with most of us, binging on The Crown and The Great British Baking Show. The biggest change for her personally after the pandemic, more than dealing with the fame and praise, she told The Los Angeles Times, will be to get her driver’s license so that her twin sister “will drag me to Disneyland once it’s safe.”
There’s a new day in America and its first light has come from the shining words of 22-year old Amanda Gorman. Among the many memorable parts of President Joe Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday, Gorman’s recitation of her poem, “The Hill We Climb,” stood out as a ringing clarion call of hope.
After seeing Gorman’s reading at the Library of Congress of her poem, “In This Place: An American Lyric,” First Lady Jill Biden encouraged her husband, then President-elect Biden, to invite the Los Angeles native and Harvard grad to give what many people now praise as one of the great inaugural poems. “The Hill We Climb” stands alongside Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright” (John F. Kennedy) and Maya Angelou’s “On the Pulse of Morning” (Bill Clinton) as not only capturing the fraught present moment but inspiring a fresh outlook on the future.
“Young people like her are proof that ‘there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it; if only we’re brave enough to be it,’” tweeted former president Barack Obama, quoting Gorman’s poem. Her fellow Angeleno, actress and director Regina King, added, “You captured the history of this country and what democracy should mean beautifully.”
Gorman discovered her poetic voice after being diagnosed with an auditory disorder that resulted in a speech impediment that affected her since she started talking. “I always saw it as a strength because I became really good at reading and writing,” she told the Harvard Gazette.
Feeling anxious about her voice, Gorman was often reluctant to read her poetry aloud. “Would the audience understand me?” she said in an essay in the Huffington Post. “Would they, like most people, wonder what foreign, exotic country I came from, and would I have to tell them that my accent wasn’t an accent at all, but a disability?”
Training her ear and her voice, Gorman would often get up early before school and read aloud from her favorite books by J.K. Rowling, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and particularly Ray Bradbury, whose Dandelion Wine “reverberated” inside her. It’s a technique she used in preparation for her inaugural presentation, reading the poem aloud over and over in the days leading up to the event so the words could be “known in my mouth.” She still has the habit of dropping her r’s, saying “poetwy,” for example. “When you have to teach yourself how to say sounds,” she wrote in the Huffington Post, “when you have to be highly concerned about pronunciation, it gives you a certain awareness of sonics, of the auditory experience.” Eventually, with a lot of work, she gained confidence. “I learned that writing wasn’t about pronunciation, but about style and the author’s voice. I learned that poetry is voice, and the courage to use it. With this courage, we free ourselves and become capable of influencing others.”
As a huge Hamilton fan, Gorman included a reference to the groundbreaking musical in “The Hill We Climb” with the line, “history has its eyes on us.” Gorman developed confidence in her voice by rapping along with Leslie Odom Jr. during his rapid fire song “Aaron Burr, Sir” on the soundtrack album. She knew that if she could train herself to do that song, she could recite her own work. Hamilton has been “so huge a part of my own speech pathology, I included it in the inaugural poem,” she recently told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. Her reference didn’t go unnoticed by the show’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, who tweeted his praise to her, saying: “The right words in the right order can change the world. Keep changing the world, one word at a time.” That meant as much, if not more, to Gorman than anything else in her young career.
[perfectpullquote align=”left” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“I learned that writing wasn’t about pronunciation, but about style and the author’s voice. I learned that poetry is voice, and the courage to use it. With this courage, we free ourselves and become capable of influencing others.”[/perfectpullquote]
It’s been a short road but a steep one from her Watts neighborhood, an underserved community in Los Angeles where her mother works as a sixth grade teacher, and where Gorman “struggled against a shared identity” with her twin sister, to a prestigious private school, New Roads Academy, in Santa Monica, a much more upscale neighborhood. Driving back and forth to school, seeing the disparity within a few miles of one city, opened Gorman’s eyes and made her determined to apply her poetry to meaningful effect. A big influence on her was the stirring Nobel laureate speech given by another young prodigy, Malala Yousafzai. After that, at the age of 16, Gorman became a youth delegate to the United Nations. “It really opened my eyes to the possibilities of what I could accomplish,” she told The New York Times.
She began to get her poetry published when she was only fifteen years old, being named the Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate. In addition to the publication of her first collection, The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough, she founded One Pen One Page, a non-profit organization that encourages youth advocacy, leadership development, and poetry workshops. Inspired by social, economic, political, and environmental concerns, Gorman wanted to use poetry to raise awareness. “It’s not enough for me to write,” she said to the Harvard Gazette. “I have to do right as well.”
Her newest writing will be published this September, a children’s book, Change Sings, about a young girl on a musical journey to empower people to make changes in their world, their community, and themselves. She wrote the book, illustrated by Loren Long, so that young people could see themselves, she told The Los Angeles Times, as “represented as change-makers in history, rather than just observers.”
For now, though, as she goes about changing the world, Gorman is stuck at home, along with most of us, binging on The Crown and The Great British Baking Show. The biggest change for her personally after the pandemic, more than dealing with the fame and praise, she told The Los Angeles Times, will be to get her driver’s license so that her twin sister “will drag me to Disneyland once it’s safe.”
