Amanda Gorman Covers WSJ Magazine Fall 2021 Women's Fashion Issue by Cass Bird

American poet and activist, 2020 Harvard College graduate, and the youngest inaugural poet in US history, Amanda Gorman covers the WSJ Magazine Fall 2021 Women’s Fashion issue. Jason Bolden styles Gorman in luxury looks from Bottega Veneta, Loewe, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello, Valentino and more. Photographer Cass Bird [IG] is behind the lens./ Makeup by Ophelie Crommar

Clover Hope conducts the Zoom interview Why Poet Amanda Gorman Wants to Be President.

The poem Amanda Gorman wrote for President Joe Biden’s inauguration, ‘The Hill We Climb’ defined her as an overnight cultural phenomenon. Describing the reading as “an out-of-body experience”, Gorman explains that when former president Bill Clinton told her it was the best inaugural poem since Maya Angelou delivered ‘On the Pulse of Morning’ at his own 1993 inauguration, she knew she now lived on a new page in American history.

AOC has written about Amanda Gorman multiple times now. We learn from WSJ Magazine that Amanda’s presidential aspirations declared themselves at age 11. The idea actually was a suggestion from her sixth-grade math teacher who cracked a joke. Gorman recalls responding to him in earnest, saying, “You’re right. That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

Presently, Gorman’s target year is 2036. When she confirms on the record again to WSJ Magazine that, yes, she seriously wants to run for president, Amanda Gorman makes her presidential run seem entirely feasible. “I think to make the impossible more proximate,” she says, “you have to treat it as if it’s in reaching distance.”

So focused is Amanda Gorman on her future, that she will not be required to clean up her social media. Her posts always align with her future goal of being president.

And she plans on fulfilling this goal through poetry. “I used to think about it in the more traditional sense of, OK, we’re going to do this poetry thing for a little bit, and then you’re going to put the pen down and switch over to politics,” she says. “Being able to talk to people like Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, I realized I don’t have to change who I am to be a leader. If anything, those qualities will be what become my strength when I bring them into my field.”

Gorman’s plan is not to be the next Stacey Abrams or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Rather, she sees herself as “a new political hybrid merging Shirley Chisholm’s unyielding activism with the vitality of poet Audre Lorde.” Her personal priorities include climate change, sexual assault and human trafficking.

We who follow Amanda Gorman know she loves fashion — and Miuccia Prada loves Gorman. Her gracious hostess skills will be on display as a co-chair of the September Met Gala, the annual party honoring the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. The night gives Gorman an opportunity to explore growing intersection of art and politics.

“All art is political. I would say especially fashion,” Gorman explains. “I think about what it meant for the Black Panthers to wear tilted berets, what it meant for African-Americans to show up in their Sunday best while marching during the civil rights movement. And what it’s meant to wear rainbow colors in terms of queerness. What it’s meant to wear white as a feminist. I love getting to find more superpowers in what I wear.”

Reflecting on the fact that her name is now mentioned in the same paragraph as Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg, Gorman seizes the moment to do a reality check. Quick to confirm how much she admires both young women, Amanda Gorman wants to be clear that she cannot save us. Nor can Malala or Greta.

“All that I can hope from my poetry is that it will give people the language or the hope by which they begin a self-rescue,” she says. “The magic that everybody else has, including me, is our actions. When we put them to work, that’s when the sorcery exists.”

AOC has left out much in this rich interview. Read on at WSJ Magazine Why Poet Amanda Gorman Wants to Be President.