Amanda Gorman

Amanda Gorman belongs on a storytelling roster for a reason that is easy to miss. She is the only name on it who writes on commission, for one specific occasion, and has to land it once.

On January 20, 2021 she read The Hill We Climb at the presidential inauguration, the sixth poet to do so and the youngest. Two weeks later she recited an original work at Super Bowl LV, the first poet the game had ever commissioned. In 2017 Urban Word named her the first National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States. She graduated cum laude from Harvard.

The craft point underneath the fame is the one that transfers. She has had a speech impediment since childhood and could not reliably pronounce her own R sounds, and she used poetry and recitation to work at it. A speaker whose relationship with speaking was built rather than inherited is a different kind of example for a room full of people who avoid presenting.

Her published work includes The Hill We Climb, the collection Call Us What We Carry, and the children's title Change Sings. The through line is civic rather than commercial: what a shared story is for, who gets to tell it, and how language holds a group together when the facts alone will not.

She is the right booking for an opening or closing moment that has to be felt rather than explained, for university and foundation audiences, and for events where a commissioned original piece is worth the budget and the lead time. She is the wrong booking for a sales enablement session or a narrative-skills workshop, which is what the business storytelling speakers on this roster are for.