Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel (1918–2007) was born on December 22, 1918, in Lincoln County, Oklahoma, the fourth child of Benjamin and Anna McDaniel, and spent her formative years in Creek County, attending schools at Green Ridge and Depew. Around 1936 her sharecropper father moved the family to California’s Central Valley. Although she began writing as a child, she waited until midlife to seek publication; she went on to publish more than fifty books of poetry and stories and became an extraordinary chronicler of migrant, working-class, and Central Valley life. She deeply loved Oklahoma and her adopted state, wrote about Oklahoma places and people throughout her lifetime, and corresponded regularly with many Oklahomans. In California she was dubbed “The Okie Poet” and named Poet Laureate of Tulare. Her archives are preserved at UC Merced and Oklahoma State University, and her life was documented in the film Down an Old Road. She died April 13, 2007, and was laid to rest in Tulare, California.