NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- Amanda Gorman, the nation's first-ever youth poet laureate who read at Joe Biden's inauguration Wednesday, says she's still in awe of the experience.
"I feel just so overjoyed and so grateful and so humbled," Gorman, 22, said during an interview with CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360" Wednesday night.
She continued: "I came here to do the best with the poem I could. And to just see the support that's been pouring out, I literally can't absorb it all. So I'll be processing it for awhile."
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She also revealed to Cooper that she has a mantra she says to herself "whenever I perform and I definitely did it this time."
She continued, "I close my eyes and say, 'I am the daughter of Black writers. We are descended from freedom fighters who broke through chains and changed the world. They call.'"
Gorman, a Los Angeles native, became the breakout star of Joe Biden's inauguration with her poem, "The Hill We Climb." She revealed to ABC News she finished writing it on the night of Jan. 6, just hours after rioters seized the Capitol in support of former President Donald Trump.
"We've learned that quiet isn't always peace and the norms and notions of what just is, isn't always justice. And yet the dawn is hours before we knew it, somehow we do it, somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn't broken but simply unfinished," she said in the poem. "We, the successors of a country and a time, where a skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one."
Gorman, who was named the country's first National Youth Poet Laureate in 2017 when she was 19 years old, was handpicked to read at the inauguration by new first lady Dr. Jill Biden, a teacher.