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There was lots of lights at yesterday inauguration events, from the president-elect and vice-president-elect themselves to Lady Gaga, J. Lo and Garth Brooks.
But among them all, the Poet Amanda Gorman, 22 come out. With her amazing words and swan gestures, she rallied the Americans around a moment of great division look towards a future based on strength, survival and hope:
So, when we once asked, “How could we beat the disaster?
Now we say, “How could the catastrophe win over us?”
We will not go back to what was, but will move on to what will be
A bruised but whole country
Benevolent, but daring, fierce and free.
While the world may have just been introduced to Gorman yesterday, she has been known as a rising star in Los Angeles for years.
A from West LA, Gorman was raised by a single mother and attended the New Roads School in Santa Monica. Gorman has describes his childhood like “that incredibly bizarre intersection in Los Angeles, where it felt like the black hood met black elegance met white gentrification met Latin culture and wetlands.”
At 14, Gorman joined WriteGirl, a local non-profit organization that offers writing mentorship to girls and young women. Michelle chahine Sinno, who mentored Gorman at WriteGirl for two years, told my colleague Caroline Champlin that the talent of the young poet was always apparent.
“The way she sees the world is amazing,” she said, “from the mundane to today, talking about democracy”.
Gorman became the first Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate, and later the first National Youth Poet Laureate. And while many heard his words for the first time today, Gorman always believed in the power of poetry and young people to cross the ditches.
“We know at the very least that poetry is powerful,” she wrote in a 2014 essay for The Huffington Post. “Youth is powerful. Together we produce enough energy to change ourselves and the world.
Read on to find out more about what’s happening in Los Angeles today, and stay safe there.
What else you should know today
Before you go… What is a coat?
In its most basic terms, it is “an outer garment worn over the upper body” which varies “in length and style according to fashion and use”. (Thanks, Merriam-Webster.) But between the naturally warm weather here in Los Angeles and the increasingly warm winters brought on by climate change, many of us who live here may have forgotten how to dress.
And yet they were there, in a dazzling assortment of colors and styles at yesterday’s Joe Biden inauguration as the 46th President of the United States.
So what is this strange garment, and who won the low-key battle of outerwear to the socially distanced festivities of yesterday?
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