Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel (1918–2007)

Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel was born in Stroud, Oklahoma, to a family of German, Scotch-Irish, and Cherokee heritage. Her parents were sharecroppers. She began writing as a child -- at age eight, she would write on scraps of paper, grain sacks, envelopes, and grocery bags, storing them away for later publication. She was educated in a two-room schoolhouse and dropped out of high school, though she later earned her diploma through correspondence. In 1936, when Wilma was 17, the Great Depression and the massive dust storms known as the Dust Bowl combined to cause the family to flee to California for survival. She and her family picked crops around the state's Central Valley for many years. Wilma also worked in retail and as a housekeeper and maid. In the 1970s, when she was in her mid-fifties, Wilma took some of her poems in a shoebox to the Tulare Advance-Register, which began to publish them. This led to her wider recognition and eventually she published 25 collections of poetry. She was called the "California Walt Whitman" and the "Okie Poet." She became the official Bicentennial Poet and Poet Laureate of Tulare, California. She was the subject of the 2001 documentary film Down an Old Road: The Poetic Life of Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel.