How Amanda Gorman Became So Much More Than a Literary Star

Gorman, good-naturedly, doesn’t want to make a big deal out of the experience, but years later, the notion that “a public figure’s life” could be mined without her consent still rankles, principally because this sort of heated adulation is now inextricable from her ascendant writing career. “I built up this narrative in my head that, you know, I had to be some type of,” she paused, raising her hands from her lap to air-quote, “ ‘role model.’ ”

It was the middle of a February day, and the weather, even for an L.A. winter, was shockingly warm, giving our meeting the conspiratorial feel of hooky. Midafternoon was the only time Gorman could steal away from her overstuffed schedule. Last week there had been a guest spot on the Hillary Clinton podcast, and next week there would be a panel with Oprah. It was Gorman who remembered to bring the blankets, and hers was embroidered with astrological signs. (“As a twin, I love being a Pisces, because it’s the two fish,” she said. She and her sister are best friends.) Her smallness is formidable. The next time we met, she brought her lunch—a veggie burger in Tupperware—and snacks for me: artisanal popcorn, gummi bears, a caramel. A meal gave me occasion to glimpse her unmasked, under a face shield. Her profile sends you back to the golden age of the supermodel. Her laughter is a great ringing noise. As we took in the sun on our patch of lawn, Gorman reflected on the long journey of her short life: “It took so much labor, not only on behalf of me, but also of my family and of my village, to get here.” A toddler in tie-dyed leggings waddled dangerously near to us. Gorman paused and leaned back faux-dramatically. The kid tittered. I had no way of knowing—apart from the telltale stretch of the two masks that covered most of Gorman’s face—but it looked like she was grinning.

“Are you going to start the story with  ‘One day, I met Amanda Gorman in Los Angeles’?” she teased. The acute enjoyment she takes in words is palpable. Her speech quickens whenever she realizes that a sentence she is constructing amounts to an interesting assonance—which is often—as when she described the oratorical styles of Revs. Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King Jr: “The way they let their words roll and gain momentum is its own type of sound tradition.” She takes it upon herself to fill silences, sometimes with words and other times with sound effects. “Do do do do do doooo,” she bounced as her mind worked on a response to a question about her relationship to Clinton, whom she’s known personally for some years. “Such a grandma,” she said affectionately. Other figures of the Democratic Party, whom she chatted with after the January ceremony, were described in similarly familial terms: Barack Obama, dadlike; Michelle Obama, the cool auntie. In the weeks after we met, Gorman, or radiations of Gorman, were everywhere: on a February cover of Time, posed in her yellow, and inside the magazine, holding a caged bird, invoking Maya Angelou, interviewed by Michelle Obama; performing virtually at “Ham4Progress Presents: The Joy in Our Voices,” a Black History Month celebration from the people behind the Hamilton phenomenon; on an International Women’s Day panel with Clinton, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Chrissy Teigen; in media headlines, nearly every time she tweeted her opinion on a current event; memorialized on vibrant murals in D.C. and Palm Springs that reminded me of Shepard Fairey’s Obama posters.

After the inauguration, she completed a tour of the big talk shows, remotely, from her L.A. apartment. It was a scene. The Trump years and the pandemic had starved the circuit of joy, elegance, positivity, intelligence, hope. But when Gorman came onscreen it was as if DeGeneres, Corden, and Noah had sprung alive from a slumber. She matched the comedians’ wit, the embodiment of spring in her teal. On his nighttime news digest, Anderson Cooper 360, Cooper asked Gorman to repeat the rhyming mantra she recites before she steps onstage: “I am the daughter of Black writers who are descended from Freedom Fighters who broke their chains and changed the world. They call me.” Cooper visibly reddened at her recitation, his composure utterly destroyed. “Wow,” he almost babbled. “You’re awesome.”

“I have yet to see her finish without a standing ovation,” observed Aaron Kisner, a stage director who has worked with Gorman on a few of her public performances. The friends, colleagues, and family of Gorman’s that I spoke to all unilaterally said that they weren’t surprised by her success. If you book Amanda Gorman, her mother, Joan Wicks, told me, “you don’t feel like you are taking a chance.” The audience, for Gorman, is not an abstraction but a collaborator in her mode of rousing, outward-facing, and civic-minded poetical speech. She is something of a caring instructor, translating critical race theory for the benefit of eager Americans. Gorman works in the affirmative mode of reaction and response; I spent hours absorbing her poems, which is to say, viewing her performances of them on YouTube. For the dying climate, she has written “Earthrise.” For the modern crisis of white-supremacist violence, in all its forms, she wrote “In This Place (An American Lyric),” her most ambitious work, a poem she delivered at the inauguration of Tracy K. Smith as the poet laureate of the United States. In 2017, Gorman herself was named the first National Youth Poet Laureate.