Generally, it’s a good idea to distinguish between a poem’s author and its speaker. In the case of “The Hill We Climb,” however, it’s difficult to avoid identifying the poem’s speaker with Gorman herself. This is because she explicitly references her own life experience. She also mentions the very event where she premiered the poem, which she read on live television for Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration on January 20, 2021. These references appear in the fourth stanza (lines 13–17):

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.

For anyone who has seen the footage of Gorman’s recitation, these lines clearly reference the very moment of her reading. However, it isn’t necessary to identify the speaker with Gorman to understand that the poem’s speaker is a self-assured and confident individual with a critical yet hopeful vision of the United States. According to this vision, the United States is a nation that hasn’t yet fully come to grips with its troubling past and thus remains fundamentally divided. The work required to bridge the divide is daunting, yet possible and necessary. It is for this reason that the speaker adopts the plural, third-person pronoun “we,” inviting her audience to unify around the project of healing the nation.

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