Amanda Gorman
A young poet laureate on a mission to spread literacy
By the time Amanda Gorman was 16, she was already the executive director of a nonprofit that promoted literacy, a youth delegate for the United Nations, and on her way to publishing her first book of poetry, The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough. “What I really wanted to do was fuse creative writing with activism,” she says.
The L.A. native’s evocative, free-form poetry earned her the honor in 2017 of being named the first-ever youth poet laureate of the United States. Now 21 and a junior at Harvard, she credits her mom, an English teacher, for her creativity. “She kept the TV off because she wanted my siblings and I to be engaged and active,” she has said. “We made forts, put on plays, musicals, and I wrote like crazy.” Gorman’s work is full of historical imagery — from the first photo of Earth from space to scenes of the Jim Crow South — and reads in part like a dissertation. “I do so much research that people will never see,” she says. “I’ll look to the past to construct a poem about our future.”
In her commissioned work — for organizations like Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project — she’s found poetry can be a valuable tool to pierce otherwise paralyzing subjects. “Being able to communicate not just the science of climate change, but the humanity,” she says. “It gets people not to feel scared, but to feel prepared to become agents of change.”
The promotion of education is at the core of her activism, and she’s currently collaborating with two nonprofits to develop an essay contest for high school students. “The judicial system might not be aware yet,” Gorman says, “but literacy is a fundamental human right.”
HANNAH MURPHY