From WriteGirl to Strong, Free-Thinking Women

Never underestimate the power of a girl and her pencil

Amanda Gorman has accomplished a prolific number of great feats at only 23 years old. Most prominently — as everyone outside of the literary world has come to know her as the youngest poet to ever do so — she delivered her poem The Hill We Climb at President Joe Biden’s inauguration. Both the poem and Gorman garnered international acclaim.

Gorman at first wrote songs and her third-grade teacher encouraged her to keep writing. At that time, Gorman has said, she felt like an outsider but her teacher made sure she felt valued as a writer. In that class she wrote her first set of poems and eventually developed a love for journaling. 

But another part of Gorman’s early life has served as a major force in the forming of the young poet and activist — WriteGirl, a Los Angeles-based creative writing and mentoring organization, whose 200 volunteer women writers serve more than 500 girls annually. Among other things, WriteGirl has a 100 % success rate of helping its high school seniors both graduate and enroll in college. At WriteGirl, ripe with social intellect and concern for justice and equity, Gorman gained a holistic writing foundation. 

Two of Gorman’s mentors spoke about the impact of WriteGirl on young girls and about Gorman, who they described as a driven young woman.

“She joined WriteGirl at 14, through her high school years, until we helped her get into Harvard,” said Keren Taylor, executive director of WriteGirl. “We can’t certainly take all the credit for Amanda. She went to Harvard and has been involved in a multitude of organizations, but we did give her her start and … we were influential in many ways and [in] putting some positive direction into her life and into her formative years.”

Launched in 2001, WriteGirl brings the skills of professional women writers to teenage girls who don’t have access to creative writing or mentoring programs. As a hallmark, WriteGirl encourages girls to explore all different forms of writing and to read writers who they’re unfamiliar with, including in poetry, journalism, song writing, screenwriting and fiction. This creates more well rounded writers and sets WriteGirl apart from other organizations as it helps girls explore all styles of writing. Their voice emerges after so much experimentation and exposure to varied writing styles.

Gorman’s other mentor is Laurie Geltman, her high school music and guitar teacher at New Roads, the socio-economically progressive private school in Santa Monica. While impressed by her student, Geltman didn’t perceive Gorman’s success as an overnight event.

“For anybody that knew Amanda, she was extraordinary,” said Geltman, who joked that the young Gorman always carried a clipboard.

“She might have had a pencil and paper, but [she] was very adult the way that she [took] notes,” Geltman said. “She cared about staying on top of things in the classroom. She was diligent and she displayed leadership qualities. She was both an ambassador to the United Nations and the youth poet laureate. 

“Amanda is her generation’s Maya Angelou.” 

Gorman’s connection to Angelou is twofold, as the second Black poet laureate to recite a poem at a presidential inauguration and Angelou is  the young poet’s role model.

Geltman has volunteered with WriteGirl for 15 years as a songwriter at its summer workshop. She taught Amanda guitar in eighth grade. She recalled when Malala Yousafzai came out, it was a big deal at New Roads because some of the tenets of the school are social justice and environmental stewardship. 

After learning about how Malala fought for girls’ education in Pakistan, Gorman applied for a fellowship to participate in an annual meeting on women’s rights at the United Nations headquarters in New York and got it.

“The organization that [Gorman] started in high school,” Geltman said. “One Pen, One Page, was inspired by Malala.”

Geltman said these are the things that students grow up with and New Roads deserves credit. It instilled ideas of independent thinking, critical thinking and social justice in Gorman. This was coupled with WriteGirl’s philosophy of not being competitive but rather being supportive and about the girls’ intrinsic power. 

WriteGirl stays in touch with Gorman, as it does with most of their alumni, trying to find new opportunities for them and making introductions.

“We realize they still need a lot of support,” Taylor said. “There’s still more of the world to navigate.”

This is fundamental to WriteGirl. In their long term journeys, it helps high school girls with their confidence, Taylor said. Once they get into college, identify the type of writing they want to do and as they find their voices, helping them on this long arc requires hard work to maintain communication systems. WriteGirl trains its staff to understand the nature of those long term relationships and how to support a young woman even during those times when mentors may have to stop and are no longer involved. 

“Seeing Amanda deliver her poem at the inaugural was a wonderful, prideful moment,” Taylor said. “But it’s also wonderful to see the impact that she has on so many others. That ripple effect … Not only are we helping girls but … we’re helping them become world citizens who want to give back to the world.”

Another WriteGirl alumnae has also realized fame. Arielle Davis, an economics student at University of California Los Angeles, joined WriteGirl five years ago. An abuse survivor, Davis credited WriteGirl for empowering her with the writing skills she needed to share her story. Davis has said the group is the first place she encountered free-thinking women.

“Now the world is getting the chance to see some of these young girls we’ve been working with,” Taylor said. “We just got finished doing a partnership with FoxTV and Arielle … one of our more recent alums. She wrote a beautiful poem in honor of Women’s History Month, [https://tinyurl.com/writegirl-davis.] It’s [an] amazing short film that comes to life because of Arielle’s poem,” Taylor said.

WriteGirl Ways

A typical exercise at WriteGirl is “Soapbox.” Each girl gets on the mic and rants about anything for 30 seconds. As a vehicle for teens to get their ideas out, it’s often followed with writing. WriteGirls start to see the connections between their emotions and their ideas — what they should put on paper. 

“Not the flowery language that sometimes school pushes you into using but more of the visceral, this is what I’m thinking, … what I’m feeling,” Taylor said.

They ask the girls to write about things they care about, like a letter to their mother. The girls explore things deeply personal and meaningful for them, allowing for ideas to come forward.

“By encouraging them to explore their senses … it gets the girls to the paper and they instantly start writing,” Taylor said. “Give a girl enough of those experiences, she won’t fear the blank page anymore.” 

WriteGirl gives its mentors a lot of training, or deprogramming from bad writing workshops or classes that make rules and obstacles that prevent “the flow.” It’s about keeping it visual and tactile and sensory. 

WriteGirl is a community, Taylor said. She especially feels it in the pride that the entire organization has about Gorman and her journey. 

“WriteGirl has been the community that I would like to have in the world,” Taylor said. “When things are rough in the pandemic, in politics, in any way, it’s my WriteGirl community that repairs my heart and soul and my faith in individuals and the kindness and joy and creativity of  writers and creators. It’s been on my mind, especially as we’re all here in boxes and in isolation.”

Taylor encapsulated how WriteGirl — its joy, support of a girl’s authority over herself and connecting to those passionate ideas — was exemplified in Gorman’s poem.

“That [was] my greatest joy in watching her perform at the inauguration,” Taylor said. “It was the throughline between what Amanda was doing up there and what WriteGirl is.”