It’s a dance that makes her look regal, and yet she takes time to give me a friendly wave as I look on. Gorman brings that same grace to this cover shoot, placing her hands just so and tilting her head to the side. So if I wasn’t pronouncing a word ‘correctly’ because of the speech impediment, people might be able to look at my hands and say, ‘Oh, she’s saying running because she’s making a motion with her index and middle fingers.’” “It wasn’t enough to just rely on my orality. “Having a speech impediment forced me to think creatively about the ways I was going to communicate onstage,” she explains. Even the way she holds her hands during a performance is choreographed. I think those things influenced my poetry and then even other aspects beyond it.” “I was raised Catholic, and my church,, had a firm stronghold in the Black community that I was growing up in. “If you look into the history of spoken word, especially poetry among the African American community, so much of that heritage comes from the Black church,” Gorman says. They weren’t just preaching the gospel, they were rousing a community to action. Watching Gorman that day transported me back to the Southern churches of my childhood, where pastors used hand gestures and voice inflections, even the occasional dance, to invigorate the congregation. And since her appearance at the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in January 2021, I - and many Americans - have been thinking about Amanda Gorman. But as it turned out, she had been thinking of me. for this interview, I insisted to my mother that Gorman wouldn’t remember our brief interaction. First there was a nod of acknowledgment, then proper introductions.īefore arriving in L.A. Of course, we did what our Black mothers taught us and said hello. It seemed a coincidence: two Black women with natural hair, wearing yellow dresses, taping segments one after the other (I for Allure’s new crop of Best of Beauty winners, Gorman for her children’s book, Change Sings). Two months prior, we were both appearing on the Today show. I have to resist the urge to scan the room to find who she is speaking to since she and I had only met once before, for a total of 30 seconds. “I was just thinking about you.” These are the first words that Amanda Gorman says when she sees me on the set of her Allure photo shoot.
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