Aug 18, 2022

Written by Kaitlyn Greenidge For Harper's BAZAAR's September Issue: Amanda Gorman

Amanda Gorman Graces Cover of Harper's BAZAAR's September Issue

Gorman is probably the most famous poet in America. She is the woman who, at 22, became the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history when she issued that call for unity on the steps of the U.S. Capitol a mere two weeks after militant far-right factions stormed the building in an attempt to prevent the election from being certified. She would go on to become the first (and so far only) poet to deliver a poem during the Super Bowl—another performance that would help thrust her into the stratosphere of the public imagination.

"As much as possible, I try to include my physical person in conversation with the beliefs that I hold.There is a real joy and power that comes with being intentional with our aesthetics. It goes beyond looking ‘pretty.’ It gets into looking our fullest selves."

— Amanda Gorman

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Writer: Kaitlyn Greenidge

In addition to being the features editor at Harper's Bazaar, Kaitlyn Greenidge is also an accomplished novelist; her debut novel We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books), is one of the New York Times Critics' Top 10 Books of 2016. Her writing has appeared in the Vogue, Glamour, the Wall Street Journal, Elle, Buzzfeed, Transition Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, American Short Fiction and other places. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Photographer: John Edmonds

John Edmonds is an American artist and photographer who first came to public recognition with his intimate portraits of lovers, close friends and strangers. He earned his MFA in Photography from Yale University and his BFA at the Corcoran School of Arts & Design. His work explores themes of identity, community, desire and belonging. Noted for his highly formalist photographs in which he focuses on the performative gestures and self-fashioning of young, Black men on the streets of America, his work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, The Art Gallery of Ontario, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The Museum of Modern Art, SFMoMA, The Rubell Collection, The National Gallery of Art, The Milwaukee Art Museum, The Getty Museum, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Yale University Art Gallery.