Poet Amanda Gorman urges civic engagement at Democracy Day keynote

Poet and activist Amanda Gorman returned to Dinkelspiel Auditorium, one of the first stages on which she ever performed her poetry, to detail her creative process and the importance of voting during a fireside chat on Tuesday. “There is something poetry can do that prose can’t always make possible in the hearts of people,” Gorman said at the event. Gorman was the first National Youth Poet Laureate in 2017 and became the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history at 22 when she read “The Hill We Climb” at Joe Biden’s 2021 presidential inauguration. Now 28, Gorman has authored poetry collections and children’s books and is a United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) ambassador. After her conversation with moderator Blessyn Nkrumah ’28, a Democracy Day executive member, Gorman read “This Sacred Scene,” the poem she recited at the 2024 Democratic National Convention.

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