Poet Amanda Gorman is eyeing a future presidential run.
During Sunday’s (July 6) episode of “Meet the Press,” Gorman, who garnered national attention after reading her poem at former President Joe Biden’s inauguration, said she “absolutely” wants to make a bid for the presidency in 2036, when she’s old enough, per HuffPost.
Gorman, 27, said she’s felt a “responsibility and opportunity” to step up from a young age. The poet recalled becoming interested in a friend’s mom’s work around sex trafficking at age 11, which prompted her to become an activist.
“I was finding out about that and I was just overwhelmed with the amount of policy that was not in place,” Gorman said on “Meet The Press.” “And I started thinking to myself, someone has to do something about these issues. Then I kind of looked around and I said, ‘Why not me? Why not now? Why not here?’”
In 2023, Gorman’s poem was banned at a Florida school after a parent deemed her work “not educational” and said it contained indirect hate speech. Gorman said Sunday that the ban felt like a “gut punch.”
“It felt surreal,” she said. “I had understood that book bans had been happening, but I think this hit me so incredibly hard because not only was it something I had written, which was besides the point, [but] that it was a moment in history. That if a child at the school wanted to hear words that was spoken at a presidential inauguration for their country, it had kind of been softly restricted in that way.”
Gorman’s appearance on “Meet the Press” came amid promotion for her new book, “Girls on the Rise.” Gorman said she was inspired to write the book after watched Christine Blasey Ford testify in 2018 that then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had allegedly sexually assaulted her.
“As a woman, I really connected with that sensation of being the person in the room speaking her truth and not being heard,” Gorman said.
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