Poet
Amanda Gorman
American poet · b. 1998
Amanda Gorman became, at 22, the youngest inaugural poet in American history when she read "The Hill We Climb" at Joe Biden's 2021 inauguration — in a yellow coat, with a delivery honed by years of working through a speech impediment that once made the letter R nearly impossible for her. The performance made her famous overnight; both her books topped bestseller lists before they shipped.
She had already been the first National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States (2017), named while studying sociology at Harvard. Weeks after the inauguration she performed at the Super Bowl — a first for a poet.
Her work is brand new and fully protected, so we describe it and quote only the smallest fragments.
Amanda Gorman's most famous poems
These poems are still in copyright, so we can't reprint them — but here's what makes each one matter, and where to read it.
The Hill We Climb2021
For there is always light,if only we're brave enough to see it.
Written in the weeks around the January 6 attack on the Capitol and revised in its aftermath, the poem reframes a wounded democracy as 'unfinished' rather than broken. Gorman draws on the cadences of the Black sermonic tradition and slam performance, building to the closing turn excerpted here — light as a choice of courage. It is already among the most-watched poetry readings ever.
In This Place (An American Lyric)2017
Gorman wrote this for the inaugural reading of US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith at the Library of Congress, cataloging Americas plural — protest marches, classrooms, hurricanes, newsrooms — and insisting that poetry lives in all of them. It reads in hindsight like an audition for the inaugural stage four years later. The poem established her signature mode: civic occasion transformed into anthem.
Earthrise2018
Taking its title from the famous Apollo 8 photograph of Earth over the lunar horizon, this performance piece turns climate change into a question of perspective: see the whole fragile planet at once, and inaction becomes absurd. Gorman wrote it for the Climate Reality Project. It shows her conviction that occasional poetry — written for a cause and a stage — is a serious art.
New Day's Lyric2021
Released for New Year's Eve at the close of 2021, this poem moves a pandemic-weary audience from grief toward resolve, built on the parallel phrasing — may this, may we — of blessing and benediction. Gorman premiered it on Instagram rather than in print, meeting her audience where it actually reads. It confirmed her role as something like a national occasional poet.
Fury and Faith2021
From her collection Call Us What We Carry, this piece argues that anger at injustice and faith in change are not opposites but partners — fury supplies the energy, faith the direction. It distills the protest summer of 2020 into a sustainable stance. The title alone has become shorthand for her generation's activism.