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Much of Wednesday’s inauguration ceremony for President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris felt like a balm to a wounded nation’s soul, especially 22-year-old Amanda Gorman’s beautiful recitation of the inauguration poem, “The Hill We Climb.”
Gorman, who was named the country’s first National Youth Poet Laureate in 2017 and is the youngest person to ever deliver an inaugural poem (as well as being an honoree for The Root’s Young Futurists in 2019), told the New York Times she finished writing the poem on the night of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.
And it makes sense, given that her words so perfectly captured the challenges and possibilities that are now before us after the swearing-in of President Biden and Vice President Harris.
In a verse that powerfully acknowledged the role she was playing in American history, Gorman said this is “a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting for one.”
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