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What questions should we ask Amanda Gorman?

  1. As Stanford students, where do you think we can find venues to use powerful rhetoric to speak truth to an administration that has so blatantly censored many voices that oppose it?

  2. How do you maintain the creative and artistic side of your work while writing for specific events / with specific messages in mind?

  3. How do you think being a poet allows you to contribute to a fairer democracy? How can we use the arts in general to meaningfully change hearts and minds to better our government?

  4. Inauguration poetry is a type of political-occasional poetry, a way of articulating a vision and hope for the temporal and symbolic moment of a presidency’s beginning. In this occasion of the midterms, what vision or feeling would you be trying to capture?

  5. With Stanford being immersed in Silicon Valley where there is a mentality that 'technology can solve any problem that humanity faces', what do you think about the role democracy plays in innovation, and how do you think we can find an intersection between democracy and innovation

  6. How do you think about the role of the artist in times like these? Has your understanding of that role changed since you read “The Hill We Climb” at President Biden’s inauguration?

  7. How do you feel about your legacy as a poet representing optimism being tied to a political administration now seen as a symbol of pessimism?

  8. How can we best incorporate poetry and the arts into our work in technology? Where does the intersection between the two lie and how do we best intertwine them?