At the Opening Session of the ASAE Annual Meeting and Expo this year, poet Amanda Gorman challenged leaders to be open about discussing feelings of pain and division.

“Where I always begin with communication is with the wound or with the hurt,” said Gorman, in conversation with interviewer Holly Ransom. “It’s hard to engage with healing without talking about the injury.”

Gorman is best known for her poem “The Hill We Climb,” which she delivered at President Joseph R. Biden’s inauguration in 2021. At 22 years old, she was the youngest poet ever in that role.  Since then, she has published a bestselling poetry collection, Call Us What We Carry, and a pair of children’s books, Change Sings and Something, Someday.

Writing the inaugural poem, she said, offered a stark example of the need to confront fear and pain. Watching the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, helped shape the poem, she said, and “solidified that we need to have elevated, careful, and loving language in our democracy.”

Gorman suggested that leaders can use a poet’s care with words even relatively mundane communications with others, who are often managing unspoken challenges or traumas. “How do I listen and hear their hurt, and fight my instinct to flood the other person with my opinion or my judgment?” she said. When leaders think through their responses—and fight the urge to speak over others’ struggles—“the faith, the humanity, and the love show up with more space.”

Why not write? Why not show up? Why not exist? Why not speak?

Amanda Gorman

Gorman spoke about how she developed that empathy, along with her love for writing, at an early age, writing her first stories when she was 5. She was largely motivated by her experiences as a Black girl with a disability. (She was diagnosed with an auditory processing disorder as a kindergartener.) “Most of my writing at that time was about trying to encapsulate how it felt to be othered,” she said. “I wanted to have a place where I belonged.”

She spoke about being enchanted with the ways that the compressed language and music of poetry could communicate—“using the smallest feather as the heaviest hammer to get across what you are saying.” Citing the examples of prominent Black women writers like Lucille Clifton, Rita Dove, Toni Morrison, and Gwendolyn Brooks, Gorman noted that groups that are marginalized often use language to assert their presence. She took that as inspiration for her own work, she said: “Why not write? Why not show up? Why not exist? Why not speak?”

To that end, she fiercely defended younger generations against criticism that they haven’t developed enough life experience to speak out. “Young people have been telling the truth in compelling ways,” she said, citing the examples of Frederick Douglass, Sappho, and Anne Frank. To suggest that they lack a voice is “erasing history.”

Throughout the conversation with Ransom, Gorman emphasized the importance of leaders to be empathetic and supportive. People often talk about elders as people who pass down wisdom, she said, “but the thing you should be passing down is power.”

To best do that, leaders should be mindful about burnout. “There’s a tiredness that is biting at our bones—we’re constantly in this culture of busy-ness,” she said. “So when we have an opportunity to show up in our best ways, we are so burned out it’s hard to access our humanity.”

An occasional break, she said, is essential. “Sometimes the best thing I can do for my writing is not writing,” she said. “Sometimes the best thing we can do for our leadership is not leading…. Fill your cup so you can fill other people’s cups.”

Gorman also said leaders should aspire to be their authentic selves. When preparing to recite her inaugural poem, she said, she received various advice about how to present herself at such a formal occasion, only to ultimately decide to be how she was most comfortable. “If you’re going to speak up, you have to do it fully as yourself, because that’s where your power comes from,” she said. “Try not to manicure the aspects of yourself that make you you.”

Asked by Ransom to advise Annual attendees about how to keep the theme of unity in mind during the meeting and beyond, Gorman suggested looking for common ground while respecting differences.

“Unity does not mean being the same,” she said. “It means that in spite of our differences, we find the same ground on which we can stand, and that’s our care, our principles, and our values. Find the people who are different, and see if there’s something that connects you.”

[iStock/Jacob Wackerhausen]