On January 20, 2021, Amanda Gorman stepped up to the lectern at the west front of the U.S. Capitol — two weeks to the day after a mob had attacked that same building — and recited "The Hill We Climb," a six-minute poem she had finished writing at two o'clock that morning. She was twenty-two. She was the youngest inaugural poet in American history.
Gorman had been selected by the First Lady, Dr. Jill Biden, who had seen her read in 2017 at the Library of Congress. She had been named the first National Youth Poet Laureate at nineteen. She had overcome a childhood speech impediment through years of deliberate practice — she has said that she worked on the "R" sound by memorizing the lyrics to "Aaron Burr, Sir" from Hamilton.
"The Hill We Climb" became an immediate cultural phenomenon. The poem's call-and-response structure, its woven allusions to scripture and to Miranda's Hamilton and to Lin-Manuel Miranda's earlier In the Heights, its direct engagement with the recent Capitol attack — all of it landed with a precision that felt, to many viewers, like the first coherent argument any public figure had offered that week.
Gorman has since published three bestselling books, been named a Glamour Woman of the Year, modeled for the cover of Vogue, and served as a spokesperson for multiple humanitarian campaigns. She is the first poet in recent memory whose name most American adults can name unprompted. That, on its own, is a historical event.
