Amanda Gorman Says She ‘Absolutely’ Wants To Run For President In 2036

Amanda Gorman wants to run for president. She recently shared her political aspirations, saying she plans on running for office when she becomes old enough to be eligible in 2036.

Gorman said she “absolutely” wants to run for office when she reaches the eligible age. The 27-year-old has felt a “responsibility and opportunity” to step up from a young age. When she was 11, Gorman became interested in her friend’s mother’s work as an activist regarding sex trafficking.

“I was finding out about that and I was just overwhelmed with the amount of policy that was not in place,” she said in an episode of NBC News’ 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?’”

Gorman received public recognition first in the political space. She recited her poem “The Hill We Climb” at the 2021 presidential inauguration of Joe Biden, becoming the youngest inaugural poet to do so.

Amanda Gorman has called out recent book bans

After the presidential inauguration, Gorman’s poem was banned at a Florida school following a parent’s complaint that it featured indirect hate speech, according to The Huffington Post. 

“It felt surreal,” Gorman 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.”

She called last year’s ban of over 10,000 books in public schools “terrifying.”

Amanda Gorman has published a new book, ‘Girls on the Rise’

The author published Girls on the Rise earlier this year. It’s a children’s poetry and picture book celebrating girlhood. Gorman said she came up with the book idea after watching Christine Blasey Ford’s 2018 testimony against Brett Kavanaugh, whom she alleged 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.