Amanda Gorman’s Inauguration Poem

By JULIA BARAJAS – STAFF WRITER – LA TIMES

Amanda Gorman, all of 22, became the youth poet laureate of Los Angeles at age 16 in 2014 and the first national youth poet laureate three years later. On Wednesday, January 20, 2021 she became the youngest poet to write and recite a piece at a presidential inauguration, following in the considerably more experienced footsteps of Maya Angelou and Robert Frost.

Gorman was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1998. She was raised by her single mother, Joan Wicks, a 6th-grade English teacher in Watts, with her two siblings. She has a twin sister, Gabrielle, who is an activist and filmmaker. Gorman has said she grew up in an environment with limited television access. She has described her young self as a “weird child” who enjoyed reading and writing and was encouraged by her mother. Source Wiki

She also wrote her poem while watching pro-Trump extremists storm the U.S. Capitol, a scene she found “jarring and violating” but not surprising. “I think we’d seen the signs and symptoms for a while,” she said.

The attack on Congress made its way into her work — not as a rupture but as a harsh fact of our history. “I wasn’t trying to write something in which those events were painted as an irregularity or different from an America that I know,” said Gorman. “America is messy. It’s still in its early development of all that we can become. And I have to recognize that in the poem. I can’t ignore that or erase it. And so I crafted an inaugural poem that recognizes these scars and these wounds.

Hopefully, it will move us toward healing them.”

Honors & Recognition

• 2014: Chosen as youth poet laureate of Los Angeles
• 2017: Chosen as National Youth Poet Laureate
• 2017: OZY Genius Award
• 2018: Named one of Glamour magazine’s College Women of the Year
• 2019: Named on The Root’s “Young Futurists” list
• 2021: Selected to read at the inauguration of Joe Biden, becoming the youngest poet ever to read at a US presidential inauguration

Her precocious path was paved with both opportunities and challenges, an early passion for language and the diverse influences of her native city. Gorman grew up near Westchester but spent the bulk of her time around the New Roads School, a socioeconomically diverse private school in Santa Monica. Her mother, Joan Wicks, teaches middle school in Watts. Shuttling among the neighborhoods gave Gorman a window onto the deep inequities that divide ZIP Codes.

“Having a mom who is a teacher had a huge impact on me,” said Gorman, who witnessed her ability to empower young people through language. Long before she began reading her own poetry aloud in grand spaces for grand occasions — from the Fourth of July to the inauguration of a new president of Harvard University — Gorman was falling in love, simultaneously, with the written and spoken word.
Gorman is a lot better at it now, but still working on her confidence as a public speaker. In fact, like her predecessor Angelou and the President-elect, she grapples with a speech impediment.

All writers, she said, experience anxiety about the quality of their work. “But for me, there was this other echelon of pressure, which is: Can I say that which needs to be said?” Gorman has labored to perfect sounds most people take for granted. The R has been a particular challenge. The girl who would grow up to perform in front of Lin-Manuel Miranda, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton and Malala Yousafzai struggled for years not to say “poetwy.”

“But I don’t look at my disability as a weakness,” said Gorman. “It’s made me the performer that I am and the storyteller that I strive to be. When you have to teach yourself how to say sounds, when you have to be highly concerned about pronunciation, it gives you a certain awareness of sonics, of the auditory experience.”

Gorman, who majored in sociology at Harvard, has spoken up in public forums about a broad range of issues, including racism and police brutality; abortion bans in the U.S.; and the incarceration of migrant children.

“There’s no denying that a victory for her is a victory for all of us who would like to see ourselves represented as women of color in office,” she said. “It makes it more imaginable. Once little girls can see it, little girls can be it. Because they can be anything that they want, but that representation to make the dream exist in the first place is huge — even for me.”

In September, Gorman will release “Change Sings,” the first of two children’s books. The poet says she was driven by the desire to publish a book “in which kids could see themselves represented as change-makers in history, rather than just observers.” It will be illustrated by Loren Long, who created the art in Obama’s “Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters.”

Despite her many accomplishments, Gorman has yet to obtain a driver’s license. But she’s not too worried about it. Her twin sister, she said, will likely “drag me to Disneyland once it’s safe, so maybe she can just drive me around.”.