Amanda Gorman still just 27 years old has become America’s most popular and widely read poet. She has piled accomplishment upon accomplishment up in a few short years from graduating from Harvard suma cum laude and being named the first National Youth Poet Laureate overcoming learning disabilities and a speech impediment. 

Her poem for Joe Biden’s first inauguration, The Hill We Clime made her a national celebrity who followed up with other high profile performances at the Library of Congress, the Super Bowl, and the 2024 Democratic National Convention as well as a bestselling collections The Hill We Climb: Poems and Call Us What We Carry and Something, Someday for young readers. 

Gorman has also carefully curated her own image as a fashionista, designer, model, brand spokesperson, and entrepreneur. She is also politically active and has openly said she want to run for President in 2036. 

In addition to the aspirational anthems that have inspired so many, Gorman also uses her poetic platform to address major social issues including climate change. In the wake of the May 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Gorman published a short poem on Twitter and encouraged action to promote gun safety, as well as penning Hymn for the Hurting. She continued to express her support for Roe v. Wade and abortion rights in a poem posted on Twitter on June 24, 2022, which includes the line, “We will not let Roe v. Wade slowly fade.” 

Today we will look back at the poem she read at the Library of Congress back in 2017 when she was named National Youth Poet Laureate. 

The hand written manuscript of In This Place (An American Lyric) is preserved at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City.

In This Place (An American Lyric)

There’s a poem in this place— 

in the footfalls in the halls 

in the quiet beat of the seats. 

It is here, at the curtain of day, 

where America writes a lyric 

you must whisper to say. 

 

There’s a poem in this place— 

in the heavy grace, 

the lined face of this noble building, 

collections burned and reborn twice. 

 

There’s a poem in Boston’s Copley Square

where protest chants 

tear through the air 

like sheets of rain, 

where love of the many

 swallows hatred of the few. 

 

There’s a poem in Charlottesville 

where tiki torches string a ring of flame

 tight round the wrist of night 

where men so white they gleam blue— 

seem like statues 

where men heap that long wax burning 

ever higher where Heather Heyer 

blooms forever in a meadow of resistance. 

 

There’s a poem in the great sleeping giant 

of Lake Michigan, defiantly raising 

its big blue head to Milwaukee and Chicago— 

a poem begun long ago, blazed into frozen soil, 

strutting upward and aglow. 

 

There’s a poem in Florida, in East Texas 

where streets swell into a nexus 

of rivers, cows afloat like mottled buoys in the brown, 

where courage is now so common 

that 23-year-old Jesus Contreras rescues people from floodwaters. 

 

There’s a poem in Los Angeles

yawning wide as the Pacific tide 

where a single mother swelters 

in a windowless classroom, teaching 

black and brown students in Watts 

to spell out their thoughts 

so her daughter might write 

this poem for you. 

 

There's a lyric in California 

where thousands of students march for blocks, 

undocumented and unafraid; 

where my friend Rosa finds the power to blossom 

in deadlock, her spirit the bedrock of her community. 

She knows hope is like a stubborn 

ship gripping a dock, 

a truth: that you can’t stop a dreamer 

or knock down a dream. 

 

How could this not be her city

 su nación 

our country 

our America, 

our American lyric to write— 

a poem by the people, the poor, 

the Protestant, the Muslim, the Jew,

the native, the immigrant, 

the black, the brown, the blind, the brave, 

the undocumented and undeterred, 

the woman, the man, the nonbinary, 

the white, the trans, 

the ally to all of the above 

and more? 

 

Tyrants fear the poet. 

Now that we know it 

we can’t blow it. We owe it 

to show it 

not slow it 

although it 

hurts to sew it 

when the world 

skirts below it. 

 

 Hope— 

we must bestow 

it like a wick in the poet 

so it can grow, lit, 

bringing with it 

stories to rewrite— 

the story of a Texas city depleted but not defeated 

a history written that need not be repeated 

a nation composed but not yet completed. 

 

There’s a poem in this place— 

a poem in America 

a poet in every American 

who rewrites this nation, who tells 

a story worthy of being told on this minnow of an earth 

to breathe hope into a palimpsest of time— 

a poet in every American 

who sees that our poem penned 

doesn’t mean our poem’s end. 

 

 There’s a place where this poem dwells— 

it is here, it is now, in the yellow song of dawn’s bell 

where we write an American lyric 

we are just beginning to tell. 

 —Amanda Gorman