Amanda Gorman Books in Order

Amanda Gorman was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, in a family where reading and school mattered. Her mother, Joan Wicks, taught English in the Watts neighborhood, and Gorman grew up with two siblings, including her twin sister, Gabrielle. Long before large stages, she was a kid who liked books and began writing poems at a young age.

Words were a way in.

Gorman has spoken about living with an auditory processing disorder and a speech impediment as a child. Speech therapy helped, but writing also gave her room to shape a voice at her own pace. She has described realizing around age five that the voice she found on the page was the one she wanted to claim aloud.

As a teenager, she started putting that voice in front of audiences. Los Angeles named her its youth poet laureate in 2014, when she was sixteen. The next year she published The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough, an early poetry collection, and in 2016 she founded One Pen One Page, a program that provides creative-writing opportunities for young people.

The work was never only about a microphone.

At Harvard College, Gorman studied sociology and graduated cum laude in 2020. While there, she continued to write for public occasions, including the inauguration of Harvard president Larry Bacow. In 2017, she became the first National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States, a role that placed poetry alongside her interest in education, racial equity, gender justice, and environmental issues.

On January 20, 2021, Gorman read The Hill We Climb at the inauguration of President Joe Biden. At twenty-two, she was the youngest poet to deliver an inaugural poem in U.S. history. The performance brought her work to a vast audience, but the poem's focus was communal: looking honestly at conflict while asking what people might build together.

A book edition of The Hill We Climb followed, making the poem available as a small volume for readers and classrooms. Her larger 2021 collection, Call Us What We Carry, gathers poems shaped by the COVID-19 era and the questions it raised about loss, citizenship, injustice, memory, and hope. Readers who come for the public poem often find more formal variety in this book, including pieces that move between intimate observation and national events.

She writes for young readers, too.

In Change Sings, a child invites people to join a musical journey of practical, community-minded change. Something, Someday makes room for the discouraging feeling that problems are too large, then turns toward small acts, friendship, and persistence. Girls on the Rise celebrates girls supporting one another and taking up space as themselves. The picture books carry Gorman's belief in shared effort into clear, inviting language for families and classrooms.

Across formats, she returns to questions of voice, responsibility, belonging, and the future. Her poems often speak directly to a listener, but they also make space for uncertainty and grief. That combination, public-minded but personal, is a useful way into her bibliography: start with the inaugural poem, then follow the threads into the wider collection and the books for younger readers.