Amanda Gormanfeels nothing but pride when she looks back on how far she’s come.
During the interview, Gorman, 23, opens up about being diagnosed with an auditory processing disorder and speech impediment as a child and explains how it shaped her life.
Amanda Gorman.Courtesy Apple
Gorman says she experienced difficulty learning certain sounds, such as “sh” or “r” — both ones that her peers had already mastered.
“Specifically ‘r’ because it is one of the most complex letters in the English alphabet,” she notes. “That was something that I would struggle with until probably 20 years of age.”
“When you have a last name like Gorman, when you are writing poetry — all of the things that constitute my identity — when you go to a school like Harvard, which has two [of the letter r] in it, it leads to all these kinds of roadblocks,” she continues.
Oprah Winfrey and Amanda Gorman.Courtesy Apple
National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman speaks at the inauguration of U.S. President Joe Biden.Rob Carr/Getty
Despite facing those challenges, Gorman says she doesn’t view them as a “weakness or disability,” but rather “one of my greatest strengths.”
“I’m really grateful for that experience because it informs my poetry,” she tells Winfrey. “I think it made me all that much stronger of a writer when you have to teach yourself how to say words from scratch. When you are learning through poetry how to speak English, it lends to a great understanding of sound, of pitch, of pronunciation, so I think of my speech impediment not as a weakness or a disability, but as one of my greatest strengths.”
RELATED VIDEO: Oprah Gave Poet Amanda Gorman, 22, Earrings and a Caged Bird Ring to Wear on Inauguration Day
Since delivering her poem at January’s presidential inauguration —where she wore a pair of earrings and a caged bird-shaped ring, both gifts from Winfrey— Gorman’s career has taken off.
She’s beensigned to IMG Models, had her forthcoming bookshit the top of Amazon’s chartbefore they were published,read a poemat the Super Bowl and evendeclaredher interest in running for president in 2036.
“When I was at Harvard, I thought I would have to go down this kind of more orthodox path of ‘Okay, so I’ll go to law school and then maybe I’ll run for local public office,'” Gorman recently told PEOPLE for theWomen Changing the Worldissue. “Now I realized that perhaps my path will be a different one, that it might be performing my poetry and touching people that way, and then entering public office from a platform that was built off of my beliefs and thoughts and ideas.”
source: people.com
