Becoming Change

We all remember Amanda Gorman from the Inauguration.

I love the change she is helping bring about. Enjoy!

At the age of 22, she is the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history and an award winning writer.

She was born in 1998, and raised in Los Angeles where her single mother, Joan Wicks, is a middle school teacher in Watts. She has two siblings, one of which is a twin, Gabrielle, who is also an activist and makes films. Amanda describes herself as kind of a “weird child” who could completely lost in reading and writing, and her mother encouraged her.

Gorman attended New Roads, a private school in Santa Monica, grades K-12. When she was a senior, she received a Milken Family Foundation scholarship. She graduated from Harvard in 2020, cum laude and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, where she studied Sociology.

She has an auditory processing disorder which causes her to be hypersensitive to sound. She also has a speech impediment. While at Harvard Elida Kochrain of the Harvard Crimson water in 2018: “Gorman doesn’t view her speech impediment as a crutch - rather see sees it as a gift and a strength.” Of the impediment Gorman says: “I always saw it as a strength because since I was experiencing these obstacles in terms of my auditory and vocal skills, I became really good at reading and writing. I realized that at a young age when I was reciting the Marianne Deborah Williamson quote that. ‘Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.’

She began writing when she was very young and had fallen completely in love with poetry. She used to sit on the playground and write in her journals - poetry and other thoughts. When she was. 16 she was named the Youth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles and a few years later she became the National Youth Poet Laureate,

Gorman’s art and activism focuses clearly on issues of feminism, race, oppression and marginalization. She became a youth delegate to the United Nations in 2013. She has two books coming out in the near future and has, of course, received wide acclaim and notoriety since her moving and dynamic appearance at President Biden’s Inauguration. This is a young woman to watch, closely. I love the change she has become and is making in the world!