AMANDA GORMAN, an African American poet and activist, is the youngest presidential inaugural poet in U.S. history. Born in 1998 in Los Angeles, California, she has an older brother and a twin sister. They were all raised by their single mother, a sixth grade English teacher at an inner-city public school. Born prematurely, the twins were diagnosed with a speech and auditory impediment.
Inspired by Nobel Prize Laureate Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan, Gorman served as a youth delegate for the United Nations in 2014. That same year, she became the first Youth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles. After years of working with WriteGirl, a Los Angeles based non-profit that assists teen girls to discover the power of their voice through writing, the young poet was seventeen years old when she published her first book of poems, The One for Whom Food is Not Enough (Urban World LA, 2015). She graduated from a private K-12 school in Santa Monica, California, in 2016.
Recipient of a Milken Family Foundation scholarship, Gorman enrolled into Harvard University in Massachusetts. She founded One Pen One Page, a non-profit organization that encourages youth advocacy, leadership development and offers poetry workshops for under-served youth.
In 2017, while Gorman was an undergraduate at Harvard University, Urban World, supporting youth poet laureates nationwide, named her the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate. The same year that she earned her B.A. in sociology in 2020, the young poet received the Poets & Writers Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award for her contribution to the literary community.
Gorman’s performance of her poem “The Hill We Climb” at the 2021 Presidential Inauguration received critical acclaim and international attention. The special edition of her inaugural poem (Penguin Random House, March 2021) debuted at #1 on the bestseller lists of The New York Times, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal.
Later that year, Penguin Random House also released her children’s picture book Change Sings: A Children’s Anthem (September 2021) and her breakout poetry collection Call Us What We Carry: Poems (December 2021).
Amanda Gorman lives in her hometown of Los Angeles.
Photo by Danny Williams.
