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I'm Jill Witherspoon Bowyer, and I'm the daughter of Naomi Long Madgett, and I'm hoping to share some information about her as a poet, the poet laureate of Detroit for 19 years, and the founder and editor of Lotus Press.

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Naomi long Madgett is a poet, the publisher and editor of Lotus Press, and she was the poet laureate of Detroit, Michigan for 19 years. She was born in 1923, in Norfolk, Virginia,

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and she was born to Reverend Dr. Clarence Long and Maude Selina Hilton. Her father was a minister, and she was the youngest of three children,

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and she had two older brothers. Her father was a minister. And so the household was very stable, very religious, and she was actually the third generation

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of college-educated people in her family. Her father was a PhD as well as her grandfather, and the family was very much aware and appreciative of the fact that not every African

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American had the opportunity to acquire higher education. And so there were expectations placed on the children. And the admonition to the children was, of course, you're going to get your education,

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but you're going to make your education count for something. It was really important. The concept of serving the community and uplifting the community was very much

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a part of their household and the way that they were raised. She was born in Virginia, and because my grandfather was a minister, his pastorate changed from time to time. So she grew up initially in East Orange, New Jersey,

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and she experienced some bias there. And her mother, my grandmother, had to go to the school a number of times to correct the teachers about how to appreciate my mother's talents.

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But the family moved later to Saint Louis, Missouri, and at that point, my mother attended an all-Black high school called Sumner High School, and there, she had excellent teachers, high expectations

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for the students, and she remarked a number of times that changed her life, because she said, in that setting, could be anything that you were good enough to be, and a lot

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of renowned African Americans came out of that setting. After my mother graduated from college, and I should say that in college at Virginia State University, she met the poet Langston Hughes and some other Black poets there

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who came to do readings and workshops at that school. And she shared some of her poems with Langston Hughes, who mentored her after that meeting. So she was on a path to pursue poetry,

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and I need to mention also that in her home, there were so many books of literature, and because she was the only girl and her brothers were older than she was, she spent a lot of time

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alone and reading books and reading poetry. And she came to love poetry. And Robert Browning was named as one of her favourite poets, and she started writing poetry herself.

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And by the time she was 17, she had a manuscript ready for publication. And her father was very supportive of her, and he made sure that her first book of poetry,

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Songs to a Phantom Nightingale, was published. So she was a published poet at age 17. She went to Detroit after graduating high school and college, and she was 26 years old at the time,

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and she started meeting and connecting with other poets in the city. And so there were a number of workshops and lectures that she attended and participated in

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to develop her craft. So in fact, in 1962, one of the poets, Oliver Lagrone, put together an anthology of poetry from Detroiters. And the book was called Ten, An Anthology of Detroit Poets.

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And half of the poets were African American, and half of the poets were white, and they met together in each other's homes, sharing poetry, reading poetry together.

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And I remember being in the house at that time, as I was growing up, listening to them, talk about their poetry, and critiquing each other's work. And then, in 1968, a woman by the name

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of Rosie Pool, a Dutch woman who appreciated African American poetry, came to the United States, came to Detroit, and met with some of those poets, and she did an anthology also of African American poetry,

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and it was called Beyond the Blues, which received a lot of publicity in this country and abroad. So my mother published her second book of poetry,

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called One in the Many, in 1956. So I remember the newspaper reporters coming to the house filming her, taking pictures. So her second book of poetry received a very warm reception.

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The other thing that happened that was so significant is that she was teaching in the public schools. She earned her advanced degrees, and she was teaching African American literature in the high schools

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in Detroit because she saw that there was a scarcity of acknowledgment and representation of African American poetry and literature. But she didn't just teach the classes.

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She developed a curriculum for other teachers to follow so that they could pass on the information that she had as well. And I had an experience myself with learning

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how uninformed so many educators were about African American poetry. When I was in college myself, I took a basic English course, and there was very little information

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about African American or non-white writers in the book. And so I went to my instructor and asked, where are they? And he replied, it wasn't his fault. He didn't create the textbook, that he wasn't aware of them,

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but he didn't whose daughter he was talking to because I called my mother. And I told her what had happened, and she sent me three pages, single-spaced,

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of African American writers, and I took it to him. And eventually, the curriculum was broadened, and this was the time. This was in the '60s and '70s, when students were demanding

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more representation for African American studies, for Chicano studies, for Indian studies. And so this fell right into line with what was happening creatively, politically,

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socially at that time. When it was time for my mother to think about publishing a fourth book of poetry, this was in 1972, she had difficulty for one reason or another,

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finding a publisher, and it's hard to say exactly why, because with publishing companies. And by that time there were so many African American publishers, so many.

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In the '60s and '70s, people had things to say, had the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Kennedy and his brother and Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. There was so much going on, and the Vietnam War, of course.

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So people wanted to get the word, their words out. They had things to express about what was happening in the country and in the world. So there were so many publishers.

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So it's hard to say why she had difficulty, but I think it's all-- it was all in the plan. So one of the questions that I have

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been asked before about her has been, what difficulties, what barriers did she experience as an African American writer? And my answer is, what barriers? If you knew my mother, you knew that she did not

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tolerate or entertain any delays in her projects and her goals. And so when she found a little bit of a delay in getting the acceptance that she wanted, she decided to publish her own book, and that's what she did.

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But she did not start Lotus Press at that point. And that it's believed that she started the press because she had difficulty publishing her book. That's not quite the case.

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Publishing her own book was a background setting the stage for what came next. She was going to get her book out, and she did that, and she learned what to do on her own.

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Because she had been teaching, she had followed the careers of other Black publishers, and one of them in Detroit was Broadside Press. That was older than my mother's press by seven years,

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when she was looking for a publisher Broadside Press had already been publishing African American poetry for seven years, and in Chicago, there was Third World Press. So she had options.

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But something told her, do it yourself. And that's what she did. So how did Lotus Press come about? And the full title of Lotus Press

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is Lotus Press, Flower of a New Nile. After her book was published, Pink Ladies in the Afternoon, one of her students presented her with a copy of her manuscript

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and asked her to read it. This is an interesting story about Broadside Press and my mother's press, too, and her name was Baraka Sealy. My mother looked at her manuscript,

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and it needed some work, but she saw promise and talent there. And so she took that project on and decided, I can work with this young lady and I can publish her book because I've already done one book.

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So taking on someone else's work really became her life's work, and she ended up in 34 years publishing over 95 books of other people's poetry, and I should also say that she started Lotus press

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when she was 58 years old. She was not a youngster, and she was teaching at Eastern Michigan University at the time, and she was so committed to helping new poets be exposed and to encourage

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and to encourage them to go on to publish more because once you've had one book published, it's easier to get additional books published. And so she wanted to help them, as her mentors,

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such as Langston Hughes, had helped her in the past. So she published Baraka Sele's book, and the interesting, funny story between Broadside Press and Lotus Press is that Baraka Sele initially took her manuscript to Broadside

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Press, and it was rejected. So with my mother being Baraka's instructor, she thought, well, maybe she can help me to improve it. And so once Baraka's book was published,

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there was a poetry reading in Detroit where Dudley Randall from Broadside Press was there, and Baraka was there and my mother was there. And Dudley Randall joked and said,

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I should have published her book. Lotus Press started and ended in my mother's basement, and she was very frugal about how she spent money, and she did everything basically by herself for 34 years.

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She would have people come in to do illustrations and help her with the book set up, but they came in as volunteers. She had no paid employees.

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And she ended up retiring early from Eastern Michigan University to spend more time on Lotus Press. And there's a story that one of the instructors at one of the colleges in Detroit sent a couple of his students

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over to her house to meet with her and possibly to arrange internships for them. So the students came to the house and the instructor felt that, poor thing, she's over there

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by herself doing all of this work. And so the students came to the house, and I'm sure she was very polite, but she ended up saying to them, thank you very much,

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but I don't need any help. I think she enjoyed every single bit of what was needed to do to run this press-- going to the post office, mailing the packages,

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reading the manuscripts, all of that. She did that by herself. And again, those who helped her for a short period of time were basically volunteers.

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And one indication of how driven she was is that in 1976, she was still teaching at Eastern Michigan at that time. And she was driving from Detroit to Eastern Michigan,

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and she was on the freeway in the winter, and her car skidded on some ice and flipped over on the medium, turned upside down. And she miraculously survived with a fractured neck.

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When she was released from the hospital with a brace, she had a friend come over to her house because she was bedridden as well, to set up some kind of contraption in the bed

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so she could continue editing a manuscript that she had been given because she didn't want to miss the self-imposed deadline for getting the manuscript completed.

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So there was, again, no barrier to what she wanted to accomplish in her work. She put herself in a learning mode because she didn't know how to run a press.

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She didn't know how to run a business, but she was determined that this was going to happen, and she got so much satisfaction from seeing new poets be exposed to the public.

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And for some of them, many of them to go on to higher things in the publishing world and to start their careers off. She got so much satisfaction.

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So her definition of success was not making money. It wasn't to be well known. It was to get those voices out and to publish quality African American poetry.

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So even though it was a small press, it lasted until she merged with Broadside Press. So Broadside and Lotus Press merged in 2015. So as I mentioned, my mother was basically

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doing everything single handedly, but what that meant was that she did not get into debt. She did not extend credit to anyone, so nobody owed her. She was very frugal and very careful

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about how her resources were used. And I'd like to compare Lotus Press a little bit with Broadside Press, which I will talk about a little later, because Broadside Press, again

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was seven years old at the time that my mother's press started. I'm sure she collaborated and got some advice from Dudley Randall at Broadside Press. She had seen how he was operating,

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and his press was a little different. In that yes, he started out in the basement as she did, but he came out of the basement. And he got an office and he started hiring people.

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And so that added to his costs, as well as the fact that he was maybe a little too generous about extending credit. And after some years, that became a disadvantage for him as a business.

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He was still publishing, still distributing, and some of his poets became nationally known, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti. But in terms of the business area,

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that was a whole different area, and that cost caused him some challenges that did not occur for my mother because she kept things under her control. In my mother's autobiography, Pilgrim Journey,

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she starts with a prologue, and the first line is that she was born into the Harlem Renaissance. And she talks about all the artists who were publishing in the year that she was born, 1923.

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She was very much aware of the legacy, the rich legacy of African American literature and poetry. And she was also committed to use her education in the most generous way.

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And so she followed the tradition of other poets by getting published as a poet herself. But also there have been so many African American publishers, and some of those publishers have

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been churches that published political articles and poems and sponsored literary contests, as well as publishers from universities and sororities and fraternities, African American sororities

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and fraternities. So there has always been a commitment to get the word out, and she was very much aware of that and very much aware of the responsibility that she had given the upbringing

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and the education that she had. Well, I'm not sure that there were challenges. I think that this was a time of proliferation of African American literature across the board,

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as well as multiple African American bookstores and publishing companies being born at that time. Again, Broadside Press began in 1965 right there in Detroit. Third World Press began in 1967, again,

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five years before my mother's press in Chicago, and there was no scarcity of African American poets who were getting published by those three publishing companies.

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And I should say that the editors of Broadside Press, Dudley Randall and the publisher of Third World Press, Haki Madhubuti, and my mother were all colleagues and friends. And they published each other's work,

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and there was no competition among them about who they published. They both-- all three of them reached out and were well known nationally, and manuscripts

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were pouring in from African Americans wanting to get published, and there was no scarcity in that area, and I haven't even broached the subject of how many other African American publishing

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companies there were in the rest of the country at that time. She wasn't in the shadows at all. And Detroit loved her. She loved Detroit, and she was recognized.

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She was promoted. She was upheld, again, for 19 years that she was the poet laureate. And she worried that when she moved to senior living

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into one of the Detroit suburbs, she was so concerned, well, I'm not in Detroit anymore. Am I still going to be the poet laureate? But nobody was thinking, even imagining anyone else

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being the poet laureate except for her. I won't say it was easy for her because she put so much work into this, but this was her life. This was her life.

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And she got so much reward from it that she just carried on, and she had two festivals celebrating 15 years in business in Detroit and poets that she had published came from all over the country at their own expense

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to celebrate with her, and then she had a second celebration at 30 years. So she provided 34 years of uninterrupted publishing, publishing over 95 books of other people's poetry.

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She published two textbooks, and in 19-- I think it was 1992. She set up the Naomi Long Poetry Award, and she set that up with her own money so that aside

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from the books that she was publishing, One of the books was going to get a special recognition as having competed with the other poets for this award. And the important thing is when these poets received

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their awards, it wasn't a foundation. It wasn't a company that was giving the money to them for their publishing. It was coming from her pocket.

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And so that award continues today. So even after the merger with Broadside Press in 2015, that award continues every single year. I recently received a request from a researcher

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for James Emanuel, who was one of the poets that she published, and the researcher wanted to include some of the correspondence my mother sent to the poet about his work.

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So she was going to publish his book, but still, she had editing to do, and she wanted to do some corrections and a little bit of nudging with some of the poems.

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And so when I looked at the letters, there were three of them, single-spaced, full pages where she was really teaching him so that he could be the one to do the nudging and the correcting

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and the modifying of some of his poetry. So that was an example for me to see just how much time she spent with each poet. And what was she looking for?

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She was looking for quality. She was looking for talent. She was looking for seriousness, and she got very excited when she saw someone that she thought could not just

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be published by her publishing company but could go on. And I should mention also that she published three poets who were not African American poets, and one of them was Terry Blackhawk, who has gone on

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to do publishing of her own. She and Terry Blackhawk worked for 14 years in the Detroit public schools in a project called Inside Out, where they took poetry into the public schools, the high schools,

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and they created a manuscript of an anthology of the students' work. So she was poetry. She lived and breathed poetry, and she would not

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publish anything that she didn't think was-- if there wasn't-- for instance, if there wasn't a candidate for the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award for a particular year because none of them met her standards,

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then she didn't publish it. She didn't choose anyone. She had very high standards, and she was a scholar. She was a scholar of literature.

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So she held herself to those high standards as well as the poets that she was reading. Herbert Woodward Martin is one, May Miller, Terry Blackhawk, Toi Derricotte, James Emanuel, Gayl Jones, Lance Jeffers,

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Bill Harris, Pinkie Gordon Lane, and she did publish one of Dudley Randall's books, and she published poet Haki Madhubuti, who was also the publisher of Third World Press.

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I think that she would be an excellent candidate to teach poetry. She was a master of poetry. She was as good a poet as she was a publisher.

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And I think that her work deserves even more attention, and I would like to see some sort of-- maybe a department in one of the universities that focuses on her work as a tool to teach poetry.

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So I'm so happy that her papers and her work is going to be accessible worldwide. One of the things that she hoped for herself personally as a writer was that her work would be remembered.

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My mother received so many flowers in her lifetime. She was so appreciated in Detroit and around the country. I cannot tell you how many awards that she received. One significant one was the Kresge Eminent Artist

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Award that she received in 2012, and this was a lifetime achievement award. And they list so much information about her, which is online.

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So I really refer people to that site for some idea of the awards and the affiliations and the ways that she was honored, and the Charles Wright African American Museum in Detroit has a bust of her, featured in the museum.

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So it's interesting that she's been gone for almost five years now, and I'm still getting requests to reprint a number of her poems. Her work has been studied.

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There are two documentaries done about her. One is called Star by Star and the other one is called A Poet's Voice. So when I think of my mother's work and life,

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she lived and breathed poetry and words and achievement. And what I would say to anyone who has a passion like that to make sure that you listen to your muse and that you follow your dreams,

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be prepared for the good luck when it comes to you because she did. She was 58 years old when she started the press, and even though she had not done it before,

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she was well-prepared with her education, with her teaching experience, with her collaboration with other poets and other publishing houses. She was well-read.

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And so she was prepared, even though she had not actually done publishing before. And so it was a thrill to her. It was something new, at age 58, that she

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was willing to sacrifice for by resigning and retiring early from her teaching job that she loved at Eastern Michigan University. But she went from one love to another love.

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It was an extension, and her whole life was an extension and an unfoldment of her love of reading poetry and writing poetry. My mother was still working into her nineties.

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She was blessed with good health. And into her nineties she was still editing manuscripts for other people. When she went to a retirement home after she sold her house,

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she was teaching a poetry class at the retirement home, and her last book of poetry was published a month before she died at age 97. And it was called You Are My Joy and Pain,

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and it was a compilation of love poems. This poem is called "Nearing Jordan", by Naomi Long Madgett, and the poem starts with a quote from her that says, "I don't what 'retirement' means.

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If I didn't have work to do, I'd have to invent it. Naomi Long Madgett at 92." When you know the shores of Jordan are not miles, but steps away

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and the chariot swings lower in the waning of the day, you may hear an angel beckon, "Come and rest eternally"

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Then a gate will slowly open, but beyond it you will see one large desk piled high with papers and a chair that bears your name

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You'll be happy to discover Earth and heaven are the same. You'll have manuscripts to edit, other writing jobs to do,

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and your joy will last forever. at your desk beyond the blue.