Amanda Gorman, the National Youth Poet Laureate who read her poem “The Hill We Climb” at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, stopped by The Daily Show to discuss how much her life has changed since appearing on the national stage.
“When I was writing the poem, I knew it was a historic moment, I knew it was an important moment…but I wasn’t really paying attention to the ways in which my own personal life might change,” she told Trevor Noah. “I did my poem, I walked [off-stage], and I kind of expected everything to be the same. And then I opened my Instagram just to look at other people’s posts, and all of my apps had just crashed because of all the followers that were flocking to my channel.”
Interest in Gorman’s work has reached a boiling point since the inauguration, and the young poet will soon be doing another reading at an unlikely venue: Super Bowl LV. “I knew about the Super Bowl and the inauguration were around the same time, and there was not space in my head for both,” she recalled. “Like I kept being like, ‘I gotta write that inauguration poem,’ and my team was like, ‘There’s this little thing called the Super Bowl, which you should also keep in mind.’”
She continued, “It’s an extant possibility that a poet would be at the Super Bowl — it’s just not something I’ve ever heard about before. Those are the moments I strive for in my lifetime, which is to bring poetry to the spaces that we least expect it so that we can fully grapple with the ways in which it can heal and resurrect us.”
Two of Gorman’s upcoming books, the picture story The Change We Sing and a poetry collection featuring “The Hill We Climb,” have occupied Amazon’s top two book spots for the past week; both will be released in September. A standalone edition of “The Hill We Climb” has been moved up from April 27th to March 16th and will include a foreword from Oprah Winfrey.