Amanda Gorman at the Moth Grand Slam

Apparently there’s a big football game this weekend in the US. It’s not really my cup of tea — though I don’t often agree with George Will, he pretty much explained the problem with football, that it “combines two of the worst things in American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.” So I had no interest in tuning in, until I read the news that Amanda Gorman would be reciting poetry before the game. This news led to discovering the video below, of Gorman at 17, performing at the Moth Grand Slam storytelling event, offering the tale of her audition for a Broadway play.

What’s particularly impressive here is that this is before Gorman overcame a speech impediment. It took her until around the age of 20, through her own writing and apparently a lot of recitations of the song “Aaron Burr Sir” from Hamilton to conquer “dropping a whole swath of letters in the alphabet.” Despite this struggle, the young Gorman holds the stage and the audience, and is as strong and eloquent as the woman we saw at the Biden Inauguration.

I didn’t think I could be more impressed with her, but Gorman continues to surprise. Let’s see what the Super Bowl brings.

David Crotty

@davidacrotty

David Crotty is a Senior Consultant at Clarke & Esposito, a boutique management consulting firm focused on strategic issues related to professional and academic publishing and information services. Previously, David was the Editorial Director, Journals Policy for Oxford University Press. He oversaw journal policy across OUP’s journals program, drove technological innovation, and served as an information officer. David acquired and managed a suite of research society-owned journals with OUP, and before that was the Executive Editor for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, where he created and edited new science books and journals, along with serving as a journal Editor-in-Chief. He has served on the Board of Directors for the STM Association, the Society for Scholarly Publishing and CHOR, Inc., as well as The AAP-PSP Executive Council. David received his PhD in Genetics from Columbia University and did developmental neuroscience research at Caltech before moving from the bench to publishing.