An art project based on the works of Amanda Gorman from the collection Call Us What We Carry as a poetic performance of the Les Kurbas Theater
We have started to work on a multi-faceted project based on the poetic book Call Us What We Carry by the modern American poet Amanda Gorman, which will form the dramatic basis for a poetic performance created by the Kurbas Theater. And today we want to get to know the author better.
“I am the daughter of Black writers who are descended from
freedom fighters, who broke their chains and changed the world.
They call me”
Amanda Gorman is a 26-year-old American poet. She was born in Los Angeles and raised with a twin sister and brother by a single mother, Joan Wicks, a sixth grade English Teacher. From an early age Amanda loved reading, anything and everything; words excited and engaged her especially as she has an auditory disorder, which heightens her experience of how words sound. Upon hearing poetry read to her as a child she decided she would become a poet. By the time she was 16, Gorman became the first youth poet laureate of Los Angeles, California. At 17 she published her first poetry collection, The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough. At 18 she founded the nonprofit organization One Pen One Page, a youth writing and leadership program. At 19, while studying sociology at Harvard, she became the first national youth poet laureate in United States history.
You likely heard of her in 2021 when she, as the youngest poet to recite at an inauguration, performed her poem “The Hill We Climb,” before President Joe Biden and the world.
"When Amanda Gorman read her poem “The Hill We Climb” at the 2021 U.S. Presidential Inauguration, she became both the inheritor of a long tradition and a herald of something new. Her verse, as vibrant and elegant as her yellow coat against the cold, illuminated the imagination as well as the occasion, confirming her as a worthy successor to several other Black women inaugural poets writing to and for an American ideal—a lineage traceable all the way back to Phillis Wheatley, who, at the dawn of the Republic, addressed a poem to then General George Washington."
Kevin Young, The New Yorker
Gorman's highly stylized works reflect upon issues of diversity, justice, and equality and draw their inspiration from all sources of life and literature from Homer to Hamilton, from protests to music… she sees poetry in everything. Even in fashion: "I give my clothes a certain symbolism of their own. To use these little things to convey certain messages and moods when I read a poem is really special and important to me," - she told Vogue magazine .
There is so much more we can (and will) say about her life! Stay tuned!
And stay tuned for the next news about the project - we have a lot more interesting posts for you!
This project is a recipient of the American Embassy in Ukraine’s grant "Strengthening Ukrainian Cultural Institutions through Ukrainian-American Collaboration in Performing Arts".