I am the daughter of Black writers who are descended from Freedom Fighters who broke their chains and changed the world. They call me.
AMANDA GORMANAs a young black woman, I notice at times in the mainstream media framing of the ‘me too’ movement you see a white female face or a white male face, and that type of questioning and interrogation needs to happen.
More Amanda Gorman Quotes
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Let each dawn find us courageous, brought closer, heeding the lights before the fight is over.
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I am my own best mirror.
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What contributed to my writing early on is how my mom encouraged it. She kept the TV off because she wanted my siblings and I to be engaged and active. So we made forts, put on plays, musicals, and I wrote like crazy.
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One of my delays was in speech and speech pronunciation, and also the auditory processing issue just means I really struggle as an auditory learner.
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I love Black poets. I love that as a Black girl, I get to participate in that legacy. So that’s Yusef Komunyakaa, Sonia Sanchez, Tracy K. Smith, Phillis Wheatley.
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I was born early, along with my twin, and a lot of times, for infants, that can lead to learning delays.
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We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace and the norms and notions of what just is, isn’t always justice.
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When you are learning through poetry how to speak English, it lends to a great understanding of sound, of pitch, of pronunciation, so I think of my speech impediment not as a weakness or a disability, but as one of my greatest strengths.
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I try to approach reading in front of millions of people as I would reading in somebody’s living room.
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When you’re someone who’s lived a life where certain resources were scarce, you always feel like abundance is forbidden fruit.
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I close my eyes and I am with this army of young women standing in a line and I imagine us walking forward together.
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Whenever I listen to songs, I rewrite them in my head.
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My Instagram doesn’t cover my insecurities, my lack of self-confidence, that week I spent crying, there’s a question of whether I should be sharing that online.
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Poetry has never been the language of barriers, it’s always been the language of bridges.
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I think we run into issues when our online brands are not rooted in who we are, and I think we need to have explicit discussions with ourselves about who we want to be, what we want to represent, and how we want to express that.
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But as for the future, I foresee a world which is more creative, more open, more loving, more ecologically friendly, more honest about its history and progress, and I think a lot of those contributions will be made by young people.
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It wasn’t until I was named Youth Poet Laureate of L.A. in high school though that I officially began calling myself a poet. I just always loved writing, period.
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I think it made me all that much stronger of a writer when you have to teach yourself how to say words from scratch.
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I have to interweave my poetry with purpose. For me, that purpose is to help people, and to shed a light on issues that have far too long been in the darkness.
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When you have to teach yourself how to say sounds, when you have to be highly concerned about pronunciation, it gives you a certain awareness of sonics, of the auditory experience.
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As a young black woman, I notice at times in the mainstream media framing of the ‘me too’ movement you see a white female face or a white male face, and that type of questioning and interrogation needs to happen.
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It was so incredible meeting Lady Gaga. I mean I’m gaga for Gaga, literally. We kind of just each flew to each other like magnets after the ceremony ended and we were both just crying and hugging.
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When they tell you to go back to where you come from, tell them proudly that this is where you come from.
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Truth is to act out of the best of ourselves.
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I don’t want it to be something that becomes a cage, where to be a successful Black girl, you have to be Amanda Gorman and go to Harvard. I want someone to eventually disrupt the model I have established.
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I did a lot of sitting back and thinking about what I wanted for myself and what I wanted for my country: more unity, more support for the arts and more opportunities for young writers from marginalized groups.
AMANDA GORMAN