Barack Obama won the United States presidential election and became the country's first African-American president-elect. His victory was celebrated before a vast crowd in Chicago, Illinois, and he took office in January 2009. The result carried exceptional symbolic weight in a nation shaped by slavery and segregation.

Obama's election prompted poetry about race, citizenship, memory and the contested meaning of national progress. Elizabeth Alexander's inauguration poem Praise Song for the Day continued the modern tradition of placing poetry within a major civic ceremony.