Author of the week

Amanda Gorman makes the rest of us look like slackers, said Kevin Young in The New Yorker. In the year since she delivered an original poem at Joe Biden’s inauguration and became, at 22, an instant celebrity, she has recited poetry at the Super Bowl, co-hosted the Met Gala, appeared on the cover of Vogue, and published three No. 1 best-selling books. For the last of those, a work titled Call Us What We Carry that is also her first complete poetry collection, Gorman took it upon herself to give voice to every human on earth by putting into verse what it has felt like, collectively, to live through the current pandemic. Not that she’d recommend anyone else following her example. “Never attempt to write a book in three and a half months,” she says. “Just don’t do it to yourself.”

Gorman took on the challenge owing to a sense of duty that arrived alongside her overnight fame, said

Clint Smith in The Atlantic.

“I try to approach that as a gift or an opportunity. That is to say, if I am experiencing something such as the pandemic alongside millions of other people, I think that’s a real opening for poetry to do the work that we need to connect us, to push us forward.” Call Us What We Carry does that, often by employing the collective “we” as it ties the emotional experience of living through a pandemic to various other great social challenges of our time. “It was a book produced in a fever,” Gorman says, explaining her unshakable sense that the emotions of the moment had to be captured without delay. “It was not something that could wait,” she says. “There has to be voice that is recording what occurred.”