Bill Clinton invited Maya Angelou to perform when he first took office in 1993 and tapped Miller Williams to perform at his second inauguration in 1997. Kennedy, who recruited Robert Frost to speak at his ceremony in 1961. Only three previous presidents have had a poet recite work at their inaugurations, per. In 2017, while studying sociology at Harvard University, she was named the country’s first National Youth Poet Laureate. Soon after that, she became the Youth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles and published her first collection, The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough. At 16, she served as a youth delegate for the United Nations. Growing up in Los Angeles, where her mother teaches middle school, Gorman began writing poetry as a child. “It’s doing that in a way that is not erasing or neglecting the harsh truths I think America needs to reconcile with.” “What I really aspire to do in the poem is to be able to use my words to envision a way in which our country can still come together and can still heal,” she told the New York Times’ Alexandra Alter ahead of the ceremony. This afternoon, with her reading of an original composition titled “ The Hill We Climb,” she did just that-and, in doing so, became the youngest inaugural poet in United States history. As incoming President Joe Biden prepared to take the oath of office in a city still reeling from the January 6 attack on the Capitol, 22-year-old poet Amanda Gorman was charged with capturing the spirit of the moment.
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