From Vogue: Inaugural Poet Amanda Gorman on Her Career-Defining Address and Paying Homage to Maya Angelou… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now! 

Under a decade ago, Amanda Gorman was still a teenage student in Los Angeles, spending her days devouring the works of Toni Morrison and furiously scribbling in her journals with the dream of one day becoming a writer. After submitting her poems to local competitions, she was named the Youth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles in 2014, becoming the first National Youth Poet Laureate three years later. And today, at 22 years old, Gorman steps up to her biggest career milestone yet: delivering an original poem, titled “The Hill We Climb,” to celebrate the inauguration of Joe Biden as president of the United States.

How Gorman got here feels more like fate than simple serendipity. A powerful reading of her poem “In This Place: An American Lyric,” delivered at the Library of Congress in 2017, caught the eye of Dr. Jill Biden, who contacted her last month about writing an original poem for her husband’s swearing-in ceremony. What was already a hugely intimidating task—crafting a poem that could both capture and reckon with the stark political division of the current moment—became all the more daunting in the wake of the riots that overtook the U.S. Capitol earlier this month, unfolding just as Gorman was finishing her piece.

Still, Gorman saw her reading as an opportunity to offer a balm to those suffering right now, in the way that only poetry can. “I’m not saying I’m better than anyone else, but I was called by the Bidens for a reason, and this moment has called me for a reason, so all I can do is show up and do my absolute best,” Gorman says. “That’s all I can ask of myself.”

Part of doing her best meant thinking carefully on what she would wear on the day; namely, a look by Miuccia Prada, a designer Gorman admires for her intellect and long-standing feminist leanings. But an unlikely accessory carries an especially moving backstory. Continuing the legacy of Black women poets like Maya Angelou and Elizabeth Alexander—who spoke at the inaugurations of Bill Clinton in 1993 and Barack Obama in 2009, respectively—Gorman was looking for a way to pay tribute to her predecessors.

Read full post on Vogue.com