either British or Nigerian. In an interview with Harvard Crimson, Gorman said, “If they thought I was from Europe, they would treat me very well like I was a sophisticated intellectual; if I let them believe that I was from Nigeria, they’d make comments like, ‘Oh, this is how credit cards work,’ or ‘You might not know this in the village you come from.'”
“Having a mom who is a teacher had a huge impact on me,” said Gorman, who witnessed her ability to empower young people through language. Long before she began reading her own poetry aloud in grand spaces for grand occasions — from the Fourth of July to the inauguration of a new president of Harvard University — Gorman was falling in love, simultaneously, with the written and spoken word.
Her mother, Joan Wicks, teaches middle school in Watts. Shuttling among the neighborhoods gave Gorman a window onto the deep inequities that divide ZIP Codes.
“I feel just so overjoyed and so grateful and so humbled,” Gorman, 22, said during an interview with CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” Wednesday night. “I came here to do the best with the poem I could. And to just see the support that’s been pouring out, I literally can’t absorb it all. So I’ll be processing it for awhile.”
She also revealed to Cooper that she has a mantra she says to herself “whenever I perform and I definitely did it this time.”
She continued, “I close my eyes and say, ‘I am the daughter of Black writers. We are descended from freedom fighters who broke through chains and changed the world. They call.'”