Naomi Long Madgett and the Lotus Press Papers, 1937-2004 (majority within 1970-2003)

Summary

Creator:

Madgett, Naomi Cornelia Long

Abstract:

Naomi Long Madgett was a prominent poet, educator, and editor, recognized for her significant contribution to African-American letters. Since 1972 she organized and operated, single-handedly, Lotus Press, which publishes poetry by African-Americans and others. The collection documents Madgett's career and the operations of Lotus Press, through correspondence, manuscripts (both by Madgett and by authors published by Lotus Press), ephemera, audiovisual material, and photographs. Lotus Press merged with Broadside Press to form Broadside Lotus Press in 2015.

Extent:

14 Linear Feet
14 record boxes
genreform: Photographs in box 14 and scattered throughout the collection (see contents list).
genreform: Visual material in box 13.
genreform: Audio material in box 13.
genreform: Books by Naomi Long Magdett and Lotus Press, and books from Madgett's personal library, have been catalogued separately. Some chapbooks appear in the General Correspondence series, where such material were enclosed with a letter to Madgett. See the Writings and Author Files series for materials from the production of some Lotus Press books.

Language:

English

Authors:

Encoded finding aid prepared by Rebecca Bizonet, 2005 Finding aid was updated by John Bergstrom using ArchivesSpace, 28 May 2025

Background

Scope and Content:

The Naomi Long Madgett Papers document the prominent career of Ms. Madgett as a poet and a teacher, and her operation of Lotus Press, which Madgett ran single-handedly for more than 30 years. Thus, the collection makes a good source of insight both into Madgett's own writing and aesthetic sensibility, and into the cultures of lyric poetry and African-American letters in the latter decades of the 20th Century. The bulk of the material covers the 1980s, the 1990s, and the first few years of the 21st century, with Madgett's activities in the 1970s being represented as well. From the correspondence collected here a vivid picture emerges of Madgett's relationships with some of the authors whose work she published--such as James Emanuel and Gayl Jones--as well as with other authors, such as Gwendolyn Brooks. In addition, correspondence and ephemera evidence the growth of Madgett's own reputation, documenting her many professional activities, awards, and honors over the years. While manuscripts by Madgett herself do not comprise a large part of the collection, the fortunes of one of her most famous poems, "Midway," are documented in detail, and an autobiography (Pilgrim Journey) provides an extensive synthesis by the author of her own influences and career (a section of which has been published by Gale's Contemporary Authors' Autobiography Series). Finally, the collection provides a close look at the daily operation, from its inception, of a small literary press.

The Naomi Long Madgett papers have been arranged into nine series: Personal, Writings, General Correspondence, Workshops and Events, Author Files, Business Records, Ephemera, Photographs, and Audiovisual. Books published by Lotus Press, as well as other books and periodicals from Madgett's library, have been catalogued individually and are shelved by call number in the Special Collections Library. Within the collection, however, much material is available from the production of certain Lotus Press books; see below Writings and Author Files.

Biographical / Historical:

Naomi Long Madgett had a long and distinguished career as a poet, educator, and editor, widely recognized for her contributions to African-American letters. She is the author of six separate volumes of poetry (as well a volume of collected early poems), two textbooks on literature and creative writing, and a collection of autobiographical essays. During the 1960s and 1970s, at the height of the national struggle for civil rights, Madgett's poetry slowly but surely gained critical recognition for its deft synthesis of an acute social consciousness, an intimately lyrical voice, and conspicuous attention to form and craft. At a time when the dominant trend in African-American poetry was toward the rejection of forms and modes inherited from the Western European canon, Madgett was writing poetry that acknowledged a debt to precursors such as Emily Dickinson and John Keats alongside Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and other writers in the African-American tradition. Among the work of her contemporaries, Madgett's work seems to have particular resonance with that of Gwendolyn Brooks, although Madgett's lacks the density of ornament characteristic of the latter's work.

Frustrated by publishers' lukewarm response to her own work, in 1972 Madgett herself published her fourth book of poetry, Pink Ladies in the Afternoon, with financial support from two friends. The imprint she created for that volume, Lotus Press ("Flower of a New Nile"), went on to grace a full-fledged independent press, although it was always run virtually single-handedly by Madgett. (She even invented a fake editorial assistant, Connie Withers, to make her operation seem more legitimate in the eyes of companies with whom she dealt.) For more than 30 years Lotus Press published poetry by African-Americans and non-African-Americans; the list of Lotus Press authors includes well-known names such as Toi Derricotte, James Emanuel, Gayl Jones, Haki Madhubuti, Herbert Woodward Martin, May Miller, and Dudley Randall--some of whose careers in poetry began with Lotus Press, and many of whom have published several volumes with the press.

Madgett was born Naomi Cornelia Long in 1923 in Norfolk, Virginia, the daughter of a Baptist minister and a former teacher. She spent much of her childhood in East Orange, New Jersey, a city which she has described as one of the most segregated at the time in the North. In her words "a lonely and introverted child who felt isolated and different," Naomi Long began writing poetry at an early age, exposed to literature by her father and surrounded by the African-American spirituality that would remain a prominent influence on her work throughout her career. When the family moved to St. Louis, Missouri during her first year of high school, she entered Sumner High School, an all-African-American school in which she felt encouraged to flourish academically and socially. Having already won many awards as an adolescent for her writing, Naomi Long saw her first volume of poetry published in 1941, the year she graduated from high school. Songs to a Phantom Nightingale was published by Fortuny's Publishers, in a contract negotiated for her by her father; preceding the publication of Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Walker's first books, this remains a significant event in literary history.

Naomi Long attended Virginia State College (now Virginia State University) between 1941 and 1945, where she studied literature and history with prominent African American scholars. It was during this time that she met and received encouragement from both Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. Cullen died shortly thereafter, but Hughes continued to encourage and support the younger poet's career, first publishing one of her poems in 1949 in the anthology The Poetry of the Negro, 1746-1949. After a semester of graduate study at New York University in 1946, Naomi Long married Julian Witherspoon and moved to Detroit, where she began working as a writer at the Michigan Chronicle, an African-American newspaper. In 1947 she gave birth to her only daughter, Jill, and in the following year she divorced Julian Witherspoon and began working at Michigan Bell Telephone and working toward a teaching certificate at Wayne State University, all the while writing poetry. The 1950s saw the publication of her second volume of poetry, One and the Many (Exposition, 1956); her second marriage, to William Madgett; and her completion of a master's degree at Wayne State, which allowed her to begin teaching in the Detroit public school system. Most of her teaching career, prior to her being hired to teach English at Eastern Michigan University in 1968, Madgett spent at Northwestern High School. During her time there she introduced African-American literature to the Detroit public school curriculum.

In the 1960s Madgett became part of a group of African-American writers in Detroit galvanized by the presence of the Dutch scholar Rosey Pool, who published several anthologies of African-American poetry in Europe. These writers gathered for informal workshops at Boone House, a residence used by visiting poet Margaret Danner; the group included Danner, Dudley Randall, Oliver LaGrone, Madgett, and others. When in the mid-60's many members of the initial group left Detroit, Madgett, Randall, and LaGrone maintained the tradition of informal workshops and were joined by a new crop of poets, at one of the epicenters of a vibrant period in the literary history of Detroit. At the beginning of this decade Madgett had published her most famous poem, "Midway"; a rousing summons to the struggle for social and political equality, the poem became an emblem of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1965 Madgett published Star by Star with Harlo Press. Her next volume would inaugurate Lotus Press.

After Pink Ladies, Madgett brought out a book by a student of hers, Baraka Sele, producing the book by hand on a typewriter. There was no stopping the press thereafter. What began as a one-time affair soon became an operation that turned out, on average, two to three new books per year; all the labor, however--from reading incoming manuscripts, to designing the books, to preparing them for the printer--was done by Madgett herself, occasionally with the help of an intern or two. Lotus Press officially became a non-profit corporation in 1980; in 1984 Madgett retired from Eastern Michigan University to devote herself fully to her writing and publishing activities. While running Lotus Press, she still found the time to publish two more volumes of her own poetry, Exits and Entrances (1978) and Octavia and Other Poems (1988); the latter, published by Third World Press, contains a long sequence of poems about Madgett's aunt Octavia and her family in Oklahoma at the turn of the Century. A documentary film was made about the book, and the poems (with additions) were reprinted by Lotus Press in 2002.

During the 1990's Madgett signed a five-year contract with Michigan State University Press, which took over the distribution of Lotus Press books and the publication of the winners of the newly established Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award (for a volume of poems by an African-American). MSU Press also published a volume collecting Madgett's early poems, Remembrances of Spring (1993). Due to what seems to have been inadequate record keeping by MSU Press of the royalties due to Lotus Press, Madgett did not renew the contract in 1998, and she resumed publication of the annual winners of the Naomi Long Madgett Award. For years Madgett said that she would like to retire the press in order to devote more time to her own work. The press, and with it many writers and readers, thrived on the strength of Madgett's convictions about the place of poetry in our lives, and no doubt those convictions will continue to do us an invaluable service. The recipient of many awards--including a Michigan Artist Award, an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and a place in the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame--Naomi Long Madgett was named Poet Laureate of Detroit in 2001. Naomi Long Madgett passed away on November 5, 2020 in West Bloomingfield, Michigan. She was 97 years old. There is, at the time of this revision, a tribute website maintained by the Naomi Long Madgett Estate in her honor at naomilongmadgett.net where additional biographical context has been obtained for this note.

Acquisition Information:

The collection was acquired from Naomi Long Madgett in 2003.

Processing information:

Collection processed and finding aid created by Dolsy Smith, 2005.

Arrangement:

The Naomi Long Madgett papers have been arranged into nine series: Personal, Writings, General Correspondence, Workshops and Events, Author Files, Business Records, Ephemera, Photographs, and Audiovisual.

Related

Separated Material:

Books by Naomi Long Magdett and Lotus Press, and books from Madgett's personal library, have been catalogued separately and are searchable via the Library's catalog.

Subjects

Click on terms below to find any related finding aids on this site.

Subjects:

African Americans--Poetry.
African American business enterprises -- Michigan -- Detroit
African American families in literature--20thcentury.
African American poets -- Michigan -- Detroit
African American women educators--Michigan.
African American women in literature.
American poetry--Women authors.
American poetry--African American authors--20thcentury.
Literature publishing -- Michigan -- Detroit
Poets, Black--Michigan--Detroit.
Poets as teachers.
Poets laureate--Michigan--Detroit.
Publishers and publishing.

Formats:

Administrative records
Audio cassettes
Awards.
Business records
Compact discs
Correspondence
Drafts.
Financial records
Manuscripts for publication
Pamphlets
Photographs
Videotapes

Names:

Boone House.
Eastern Michigan University--Dept. of English.
Lotus Press.
Michigan State University Press.
Long, Wilbur.
Angelou, Maya.
Archer, Dennis.
Baker, Houston A.
Blake, Eubie, 1883-
Boyer, Jill Witherspoon, 1947-
Breman, Paul.
Brooks, Gwendolyn, 1917-
Clifton, Lucille, 1936-
Cobb, Pamela, 1950-
Crew, Louie, 1936-2019
Cullen, Countee, 1903-1946.
Derricotte, Toi, 1941-
Dove, Rita.
Emmanuel, James A.
Fair, Ronald.
Faust, Naomi F.
Harris, Bill, 1932-
Hood, Nicholas.
Hughes, Langston, 1902-1967.
Johnston, Agnes Nasmith.
Jones, Gayl.
Knight, Etheridge.
Kocher, Ruth Ellen, 1965-
Lane, Pinkie Gordon.
Love, Monifa A.
Madhubuti, Haki R., 1942-
McFerrin, Robert, 1921-
Miller, May.
Oseye, Ebele, 1943-
Owens, Carl.
Randall, Dudley, 1914-
Reed, Ishmael, 1938-
Reese, Carolyn.
Sanchez, Sonia, 1934-
Tartt, Peggy Ann.
Thompson, Julius Eric.
Vest, Donald.
Vest, Hilda.
White, Paulette Childress, 1948-
Whitley, James R., 1966-
Williams, Willie J.