Amanda Gorman

Amanda Gorman, whose recitation of "The Hill We Climb" at the 2021 inauguration made her America's most famous poet, has never met a mountain she couldn't scale.

- KAITLYN GREENIDGE

Amanda Gorman already knows you want her to save the world. "Young people are expected to rescue everyone, even when we're struggling to rescue ourselves," she tells me in the same clear, strident voice she used to deliver her poem "The Hill We Climb," which she performed at President Biden's 2021 inauguration.

Gorman is probably the most famous poet in America. She is the woman who, at 22, became the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history when she delivered that call for unity on the steps of the U.S. Capitol a mere two weeks after militant far-right factions stormed the building in an attempt to prevent the election from being certified. She would go on to become the first (and so far only) poet to deliver a poem during the Super Bowl-another performance that would help thrust her into the stratosphere of the public imagination.

We're talking on a sunny day in July. Gorman, now 24, is at her home in Los Angeles; I am in Brooklyn. She is wearing a gray zip-up sweater, her flawless brown skin shining brightly, dappled by the green shade in the outdoor courtyard where she's seated. Occasionally, as we speak, she stops and raises her eyes to the sky; she's distracted by a hummingbird floating by. It's an idyllic scene beamed at me through my laptop screen, like those visions of a technocratic green utopian future that were popular in sci-fi films in the early aughts, back when the future seemed exciting.