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Kim Mills and Sharon Clark decided to travel together to a singing contest earlier this month and joked about both of them winning their competitions.

Mills, 41, won the Cab Calloway Vocal Competition for men, and Clark, 45, won the 17th annual Billie Holiday Vocal Competition for women.

This was the first year that Artscape, an annual Baltimore outdoor arts festival, hosted the Cab Calloway competition. This year would have been the jazz singer’s 100th birthday.

‘‘I said, this is predestined,” Clark said of their wins.

Mills, likewise, said he felt winning the competition was a spiritual experience.

Clark, a receptionist, said one day she would like to follow Mills’ lead of singing full-time. Mills decided in July to quit teaching to pursue his singing career after deciding he wasn’t fulfilled with his former profession. Most recently, he was a math teacher at Silver Spring International Middle School and had taught a total of 13 years.

‘‘I think it’s going well. I’m pleased with the opportunities I’ve had,” he said.

The Adelphi residents met four years ago when Clark was singing at a hotel and Mills introduced himself, she said.

‘‘He’s dedicated and works hard at what he does,” she said. ‘‘We have a blast together.”

Mills similarly admires his friend’s ability to belt out a tune.

‘‘Phenomenal is not the word. Sharon is stellar,” he said.

In the first round, Clark was one of 23 women to compete, and Mills was one of eight men, said Randi Vega, director of cultural affairs for the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts, which put on Artscape from July 20 to 22.

Singers were judged on their voice quality, intonation, rhythmic sense, appearance and diction, she said.

‘‘It’s a very tough competition. We had some fine contestants. It was very intense,” Vega said.

Both Clark and Mills plan to use their $2,500 prizes to release compact discs of their music.

This was Clark’s second competition and win after not competing for more than 20 years when someone told her overweight women didn’t win competitions.

But winning the top $10,000 prize in the American Traditional Vocalist Competition in Savannah, Ga. emboldened her in the spring, she said. She learned of the contest from a friend and after visiting the Web site, she said she saw last year’s winners were not the gorgeous women she had heard won competitions.

‘‘My own attitude was that I thought I wasn’t gorgeous...I had seen others get [treated unfairly] because they didn’t look a certain way,” Clark said.

Still, Clark wasn’t sure, despite her friends urging her to enter. She finally sent her audition package two days before the Dec. 28 deadline.

As for Mills, the Cab Calloway competition was his first, and he described it as surreal because C. Calloway Brooks, one of the singer’s grandsons, was a judge in the contest. Still, he didn’t want to emulate Calloway, he said.

‘‘I was like, wow, it’s royalty,” he said of singing before Brooks. ‘‘Cab Calloway is Cab Calloway. People say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I don’t know — I didn’t want to make a caricature.”

E-mail Jennifer Donatelli at jdonatelli@gazette.net.