By Claudia Eller
FROM: Variety

When Amanda Gorman was 5 years old, she would pull her mom out of bed in the early morning hours to get her a pen and paper so she could write.

“She actually had to pay me a quarter for every day that I stayed in bed rather than wake her up so she could actually get eight hours of sleep,” recalls Gorman, now 23. “And then I could write later.”

It was Gorman’s mother, a sixth-grade English teacher, who told her young daughter that her voice was her superpower.

“Can you imagine that as a girl with a speech impediment how that felt like an oxymoron? And as I’ve grown up I understand that, as always, my mother was 100% right. My superpower is my voice.”

When Gorman was 14, her mom enrolled her in the nonprofit creative writing and mentoring organization WriteGirl to help her overcome her disability and gain confidence in her work. Gorman has fond memories of the adult women mentors she was paired with back then: “They gave me the confidence that I wasn’t an aspiring writer — I was a writer.”

Gorman never stopped writing, and her own experiences at WriteGirl have inspired her to give advice to other young artists. Her poetry has brought her enormous recognition as a young adult. She has already entered the history books as the country’s first National Youth Poet Laureate and the youngest poet ever to recite her work at a presidential inauguration, joining an elite group of legendary poets like Maya Angelou and Robert Frost to have that honor. Read Rest of Article Here