This article was originally published in June 2021

She made headlines after performing a poem during Joe Biden’s inauguration. But it would be a poor idea to think of Amanda Gorman as a one-hit wonder.

The poetic manifesto by then twenty-two-year-old Amanda Gorman that accompanied the inauguration of the Biden-Harris presidency in 2021 was one of the most frequently cited and commented on cultural texts in the first quarter of the year. The Booker Prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo called her hypnotizing rendition a communal event: “A triumph for black women worldwide.” Lauren K. Alleyne, a published poet and Assistant Director of Furious Flower—the first academic center for Black poetry in the US—expressed a similar sentiment on her Facebook page. She observed that “The Hill We Climb” is written “in the tradition of occasional poems including the five previous,” before adding that “sometimes the priority ain’t the poem, but the moment . . .”.

Already during the swearing-in of the president and vice president, as her premiere performance of “The Hill We Climb” was in full swing, the recognizability of Amanda Gorman skyrocketed, reaching an unprecedented level—as far as poetry is concerned. The