‘I Always Think of Poetry as Home for Me’
Updated at 7:34 p.m. ET on December 19, 2021.
Seven years ago, I did a poetry reading at New Roads School, in Santa Monica, California. The students were incredible. They were funny, they were incredibly smart, and they asked the sorts of questions I had not been asked before. But one student stood out in particular. She was ebullient and curious and thoughtful. One of her teachers shared with me that she had recently been named the Los Angeles youth poet laureate. Her name was Amanda Gorman.
Last year, like millions of others, I watched Gorman step behind a lectern on the steps of the U.S. Capitol—where just weeks before a violent mob of insurrectionists had attempted to overturn the results of the presidential election—and deliver an inaugural poem that transfixed the world and transformed her life.
She has since published her inaugural poem, “The Hill We Climb,” as well as a children’s book, Change Sings, both of which were instant No. 1 New York Times best sellers. She has been on the cover of Vogue, Variety, and Time. She has read a poem for the Super Bowl. She has Oprah’s phone number. In her new book, Call Us What We Carry, her first full-length poetry collection, Gorman grapples with how the coronavirus pandemic has reshaped our lives and further exacerbated America’s already deep inequality, how the racial reckoning of the past year is in conversation with history that preceded it, and what it means to live in a world where the climate crisis hangs like a dark cloud over everything we do.
I recently spoke with Gorman about her new book, her new life, and whether she could have ever imagined that she would be in the place she finds herself. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What has this year been like for you? You became perhaps the most well-known poet in the world in a matter of minutes. Also, like all of us, you’ve been living through a pandemic. How is
