After wowing the country with her jaw-dropping Inauguration Day poem, “The Hill We Climb,” Amanda Gorman is returning to the spotlight Sunday night to recite an original poem at Super Bowl LV (which is free to watch this year). Before the 22-year-old takes her inspirational talents to the NFL, where she is sure to make waves yet again, learn everything you need to know about the inaugural poet below.
Born on March 7, 1998, Gorman and her two siblings, including her twin sister Gabrielle, were raised by their mother, sixth-grade teacher Joan Wicks in Los Angeles, California at an “incredibly odd intersection in Los Angeles, where it felt like the black ‘hood met black elegance met white gentrification met Latin culture met wetlands,’” she told The New York Times. Gorman’s interest in writing and public speaking was sparked early, and while her classmates tired themselves out on the playground, Gorman was writing in my journal on a park bench or trying to write my own dictionary. She was “obsessed with everything and anything” and wanted to “learn everything, to read everything, to do everything.”
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By second grade, Gorman had her first touch of public speaking, performing a monologue in which she assumed the voice of Chief Osceola of Florida’s Seminole tribe, the Los Angeles Times reported, and by eighth grade she “made a promise to myself: To never stop writing, and to always represent marginalized figures in my work.” She made that vow after picking up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in eighth grade and for the first time in her life encountering a book “with a dark-skinned, nappy-haired girl on the cover.” She read reading the book “was almost like reteaching myself how to write unapologetically in a black and feminist aesthetic that was my own.” From that point on, she began to discover her voice, “the voice of an unashamed black woman who also by way of a speech impediment understood what it was like to be silenced, and didn’t wish this fate on any other soul.”
It was in high school that Gorman first started thinking about publishing, and by the age of 16, Gorman had not only founded One Pen One Page, a non-profit organization that encourages youth advocacy, leadership development, and poetry workshops, but had also been named Youth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles. Just three years later, at the age of 19, she became the first national youth poet laureate. Gorman already has a number of other accolades, with her poem “In This Place (An American Lyric)” having been acquired by the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City. In 2018, she was named one of Glamour’s College Women of the Year.
Gorman gained national attention when, on Jan. 20, she stood at a podium in the nation’s capital and recited her poem, “The Hill We Climb.” She has since gone on to complete a deal with IMG Models, and just days after delivering her poem, it was confirmed she would recite a poem on Super Bowl Sunday. As for what’s in her future? Gorman previously told The New York Times she hopes to run for president in 2036.
