[imagesource: Alex Wong/Getty]
There’s nothing quite like a presidential inauguration to really launch your career.
After Amanda Gorman took the podium and recited her poem, The Hill We Climb, she became a household name overnight.
Less than a day later, as of Thursday morning, two of her books had risen to the top of Amazon and Barnes & Noble’s bestseller lists.
Both books, a poetry collection titled The Hill We Climb and a children’s picture book, Change Sings, aren’t even commercially available yet, but pre-orders are through the roof, and Gorman, as she wrote on Twitter, is “on the floor”.
I AM ON THE FLOOR MY BOOKS ARE #1 & #2 ON AMAZON AFTER 1 DAY! Thank you so much to everyone for supporting me and my words. As Yeats put it: “For words alone are certain good: Sing, then”
— Amanda Gorman (@TheAmandaGorman) January 20, 2021
Both books are only due for release on September 21, via Viking Books.
Speaking about the poem that she wrote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ swearing-in, to the New York Times, she said:
“I had this huge thing, probably one of the most important things I’ll ever do in my career.”
“It was like, if I try to climb this mountain all at once, I’m just going to pass out.”
Per The Independent, Gorman was only halfway through writing her poem when the US Capitol was stormed by pro-Trump rioters, changing the trajectory of her work. She finished it on January 6.
“In my poem, I’m not going to in any way gloss over what we’ve seen over the past few weeks and, dare I say, the past few years,” she said.
“But what I really aspire to do in the poem is to be able to use my words to envision a way in which our country can still come together and can still heal. It’s doing that in a way that is not erasing or neglecting the harsh truths I think America needs to reconcile with.”
Hear more of her story, and an interview with Gorman about the inauguration, here:
I can’t wait to see what she does next.
[source:nytimes&independent]
