NEW YORK -- Within hours of Amanda Gorman's reading of the inaugural poem last week, bookstores were hearing from their customers.
Interest in the 22-year-old Gorman and demand for her work has not slowed down since much of the world discovered her and "The Hill We Climb," a highlight of the ceremony marking President Joe Biden's inauguration.
Two books scheduled for September, the picture story "The Change We Sing" and a poetry collection featuring "The Hill We Climb," have occupied the top two spots on Amazon.com for the past week.
The release of the fourth-ranked book, a stand-alone edition of "The Hill We Climb," has been moved up from April 27th to March 16th and will include a foreword from Oprah Winfrey.
Penguin says each of the three books have announced first printings of one million copies -- numbers that virtually no poet would dare even fantasize about.
Gorman, who at 17 became the country's National Youth Poet Laureate, is a longtime Los Angeles resident who credits poetry with helping her work on a speech impediment.
Gorman is by far the youngest of the poets to read at presidential inaugurations since Robert Frost was invited to John F. Kennedy's in 1961.
The only inaugural poem to approach the popularity of "The Hill We Climb" is the late Maya Angelou's "On the Pulse of the Morning," which she read at the 1993 ceremony for President Bill Clinton.
A bound edition went on to sell more than one million copies, though Angelou at the time was already famous for her memoir "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings."
Gorman had never published a book before this year.
