When Mildred Pearson Taylor was a young girl in Elizabeth City, two teachers encouraged her to write. That encouragement would pay off throughout her life and Taylor would become an educator and woman of letters, penning award-winning poetry.

Taylor is the Senior Poet Laureate of Pennsylvania.

“I owe everything to them,” says Taylor, 80, of her teachers.

Her teachers were Wilma Flood and Nancy Ferebee. Both women pushed Taylor to excel.

Ferebee, who was Nancy Meekins back then, still keeps tabs on her former students. She was recently celebrating the success of Taylor, sharing the honor bestowed upon the poet with friends here in Elizabeth City.

Flood was the one, however, who encouraged Taylor to write her first poem, back in the fifth grade.

“She read it to the class and I was so thrilled,” recalls Taylor.

Today Taylor lives in rural Pennsylvania, not far from Pittsburg. It’s there where she has twice earned the honor of Senior Poet Laureate.

Taylor, who has been writing poetry since that first poem penned so many years ago, has been a member of the Pittsburg Poetry Society for 46 years. She has entered contests off and on, but was encouraged to enter this particular one and found success in it.

She is not, however, taken to entering too many contests.

“It’s a pain in the butt to go through all the particular rules to enter contests,” she says.

And yet this particular contest seemed to suit her. So much so, in fact, that she became national runner up for the U.S. Senior Poet Laureate position open to poets 50 years old and older.

Up to that point, Taylor had been writing poetry off and one since her first, fifth grade piece. That poem was simply about spring.

“It was about spring and robins and the nest and eggs,” recalls Taylor.

Her love of writing and poetry would eventually land her on the staff of her school newspaper, The Loud Speaker. That was back when there was an Elizabeth City High School, formerly located in the old Elizabeth City Middle School building on the corner of Road and Elizabeth Streets.

“I wrote an article and got accepted on the staff,” says Taylor. “My junior and senior year I was features editor and I wrote a gossip column.”

Flood and Ferebee, recalls Taylor, encouraged her to continue her education and attend college. So she went to an all-girl’s college in Greensboro, a school that is today the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

“I studied English,” says Taylor. “I went there three years, dropped out, got married and had three children.”

She and her husband Gus had moved to Pennsylvania. Shortly before the birth of her third child, Taylor completed her English degree at a college there.

Being involved in the local PTA and her children’s school life, Taylor says she was recruited to become a teacher.

“The administration offered me a job teaching,” she said.

And so Mildred Taylor taught gifted students for 30 years. And throughout that time, she would write poetry.

“When I had time,” she says.

Taylor would also go on to get her masters in education degree. And she would eventually join the Pittsburg Poetry Society, where poets gathered to share their work.

But Taylor is quick to admit that she’s not one to read her own work. She says in the past when asked to read her work, she would employ her husband Gus to do it.

And these days, as a Senior Poet Laureate, she says she is asked to go around the state and read, but that doesn’t suit her either.

“I won’t do it because I get choked up,” says Taylor.

Taylor grew up on Road Street in Elizabeth City, several houses down from the old high school. Her father ran an auto repair shop on Southern Avenue and her mother held jobs in town, including working at Belk when it was located on Main Street.

But Taylor hasn’t been back to old Betsy Town in some time. In fact, her only memory of the corner of Road and Main Streets, where Muddy Waters Coffee House resides, was that of a Texaco station.

Taylor was saddened to learn that the Carolina Building had burned down in 1967. Yet she was equally pleased to learn that the old Chesson’s Department Store is now Arts of the Albemarle and the Maguire Theatre.

“I bought a pair of shoes there once,” Taylor said of Chesson’s.

And while things have changed here since she lived in Elizabeth City, her memories of those days have not vanished. Even in prose, Taylor has memorialized her childhood here, remembering a time sitting on the curb on a summer day, chewing freshly laid tar from Road Street.

“But you had to be careful because if it cooled down it would stick to your teeth,” she said, laughing at a childhood stunt so many years ago.

Taylor will go on writing poetry, she says. She will write poetry about life’s observations and she will likely submit to the occasional contest.

She has also recently published a book of poetry through the Pittsburgh Poetry Society, “The Potter’s Wheel.”