Originally a teacher, she later found fame with her award-winning poems and was also the founder and senior editor of Lotus Press, established in 1972, a publisher of poetry books by black poets.
[2][3] Naomi was 18 months old when the family moved to East Orange, New Jersey, where her father was pastor of Calvary Baptist Church.
[5] At the age of 17 she published her first small collection of poetry, Songs to a Phantom Nightingale (1941), a few days after graduating from high school.
[5] She began studies at New York University in 1946,[6] but that year moved to Detroit, Michigan, after marrying Julian Fields Witherspoon, whom she had first met at Sumner High School.
[9] Her poem "Midway", from her 1956 collection One and the Many, attracted wide attention as it portrayed black people's struggles, and victories, in a time when racism was prevalent in the United States.
[3] In 1968, she taught creative writing and black literature at Eastern Michigan University, where she was appointed associate professor of English.
[10] The imprint published Black writers such as Herbert Woodward Martin, Dolores Kendrick, James A. Emanuel, Gayl Jones, Haki Madhubuti, May Miller, Toi Derricotte, and Dudley Randall, and for many years was run by Madgett from her basement mostly single-handedly – though in the early years she invented an editorial assistant named Connie Withers "to give the imprint corporate heft.