In 1993, The Naomi Long Madgett Award for poetry was created. The national prize is awarded annually to an outstanding poet of the African-American community. The 2005 recipient is Carolyn Beard Whitlow, Professor of English at Guilford College. Whitlow won the award for her book of poetry Vanished. Whitlow said that with Vanished she “wanted to leave a legacy.”

The book focuses on Whitlow’s family. She spent a number of years researching and tracing her roots in the American South and the Caribbean. “This collection of poems is a very personal, a sage of my lineage,” said Whitlow.

Many of the poems in Vanished deal with her mother, including one of her favorite poems, “Four Patch.”

“It’s a poem of redemption and forgiveness, and is about my mother. A number of poems address my mother.”

Vanished is very different from her previous book, in which Whitlow says she wore a mask. “As a collection, it makes me as a person naked and vulnerable. It’s very close to confessional poetry.”

Not only was the award for Vanished gratifying, the prize was Whitlow’s strength in her darkest times. Whitlow remembers when she found out she had one the award. “The call came at 9:30 the night before I was to have surgery for breast cancer. I told my daughter that if I got scared to whisper ‘book’ in my ear. It gave me a reason,” said Whitlow.

Whitlow teaches three classes here at Guilford: a poetry workshop and two sections of the historical perspectives course “Black Women’s in History and Literature.” “Poetry is a calling,” she said. “I didn’t decide I was going to be a writer, it was something in my psyche or subconscious.”

While working on her dissertation at Cornell University, Whitlow would find herself scribbling poems down on legal pads. That was how she discovered she was a poet – by answering the call that came from within to write.

“I decided to leave the Ph. D. program and join an MFA program at Brown University.”

The inner calling Whitlow experienced is also why she credits her desire to become a poet with no one but herself. “When writing is a calling, the writing is internal, not external,” she said.

The award is named after Naomi Long Madgett, Ph.D. According to Lotus Press: “[Madgett is] Poet Laureate of the City of Detroit, is the author of nine books of poetry and two textbooks, and editor of two anthologies. Her poems appear in numerous journals and more than 180 anthologies both here and abroad. Several have been set to music and publicly performed. Her career as a published poet spans more than 60 years, her first small collection appearing when she was only 17 years old.”

There is a strict set of guidelines for winning the Naomi Long Madgett Award. Eligibility rules include being African-American and having no previous books published by Lotus Press. The manuscript entered must not be published by anyone else.

Contestants mail 60-90 page manuscripts to Lotus Press, a Detroit-based publishing company. The winning manuscript is then printed, and the winning writer is awarded $500.

Whitlow cannot enter another manuscript for the Naomi Long Madgett Award, but she continues to answer the call to write poetry. Whitlow is now working on her third book, which will be nothing like Vanished.

“I’m working on a collection of poems which are personae poems, with characters that range from a witch to a former slave.