Amanda Gorman

A five-minute reading at the United States Capitol on 20 January 2021 made Amanda Gorman, then 22, the youngest poet ever to read at a presidential inauguration. The Hill We Climb, delivered that morning, was issued as a stand-alone volume by Viking that March, fronted by Oprah Winfrey and went straight to the top of the bestseller lists. Gorman grew up in Los Angeles, born in 1998 and raised by her mother Joan Wicks, a sixth-grade English teacher in Watts, with a twin sister, Gabrielle. An auditory processing disorder and a speech impediment shaped her early years; she practised partly by reciting song lyrics. Los Angeles named her its youth poet laureate at sixteen, she took the National Youth Poet Laureate title in 2017, the first person to hold it, and she read sociology at Harvard, graduating cum laude in 2020. Viking published Call Us What We Carry in December 2021, setting the inaugural poem alongside work on the pandemic, on ships, and on American memory.