Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Names and faces
■ Amanda Gorman, who became a national sensation when she delivered a stirring poem at President Joe Biden’s inauguration in January, said Friday that a security guard had followed her home and told her she looked suspicious. “A security guard tailed me on my walk home tonight,” Gorman wrote on Twitter. “He demanded if I lived there because ‘you look suspicious.’ I showed my keys & buzzed myself into my building. He left, no apology. This is the reality of black girls: One day you’re called an icon, the next day, a threat.” Gorman said in another tweet: “In a sense, he was right. I AM A THREAT: a threat to injustice, to inequality, to ignorance. Anyone who speaks the truth and walks with hope is an obvious and fatal danger to the powers that be.” Gorman, 22, who is from Los Angeles, did not immediately respond to a message sent through her website Friday night. She is the youngest inaugural poet ever in the United States and was named the United States’ first youth poet laureate in 2017, when she was a student at Harvard. At Biden’s inauguration, she drew widespread acclaim when she recited, in a voice filled with clarity and emotion, “The Hill We Climb” in front of the sunlit Capitol, just days after a violent mob had laid siege to the building as Congress met to certify the results of the presidential election. In the poem, Gorman spoke of “striving to forge a union with purpose, to compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.”
■ The Dalai Lama, the 85-year-old Tibetan spiritual leader, was administered the first shot of the coronavirus vaccine Saturday at a hospital in the north Indian hill town of Dharmsala. After receiving the injection, he urged people to step forward, be brave and get vaccinated. “In order to prevent some serious problems, this injection is very, very helpful,” he said. Dr. G.D. Gupta of Zonal Hospital, where the shot was administered, told reporters that the Dalai Lama was observed for 30 minutes afterward. “He offered to come to the hospital like a common man to get himself vaccinated,” he said. Ten other people who live in the Dalai Lama’s residence were also vaccinated, Gupta said. All 11 received the Covishield vaccine, which was developed by Oxford University and drugmaker AstraZeneca.