In the foreword to Phantom Nightingale: Juvenilia (1981) poet, teacher, and publisher Naomi Long Madgett notes: "I do not recall any time in my life when I was not involved with poetry." Since 1941 Madgett has published seven volumes of poetry; she has taught in the public schools of Detroit and at Eastern Michigan University; and she has served as publisher and editor of Lotus Press, also in Detroit, since 1974.

Born in Norfolk, Virginia, on 5 July 1923, Naomi Cornelia Long spent her childhood in East Orange, New Jersey, where her father, Clarence Marcellus Long, served as a Baptist minister. As a child, she often sat on the floor of his study reading Aesop's fables or Robert T. Kerlin's anthology Negro Poets and Their Poems (1923). She also studied an elocution book that her mother, Maude Hilton Long, had used as a student at Virginia State College, memorizing some of its poems for...