Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel passed away of natural causes on April 13, 2007. This channel on our Website is a tribute to her life and work.

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"Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel certainly expressed with great clarity a life that is disappearing from us--the small town, 'living close to the land' life of Central California--and expressed it lyrically and meaningfully. I'll miss her."
--Al Young, California State Poet Laureate, April 2007

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She is, without a doubt, the finest writer to emerge from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl exodus to California during the 1930's.
--Franz Weinschenk, Valley Public Radio, Fresno/Bakersfield

I wish there were more poets like Wilma McDaniel...Little slices of real truth, to be long savored.
--Pete Seeger

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Two of the toughest, but also most generous voices of the working class during the last half-century have belonged to Lucille Clifton and Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel. Clifton and McDaniel differ from many of the poets mentioned in this book in that they have maintained a strong sense of working-class community...Though Wilma McDaniel, now past eighty, has been writing poems since childhood, her first book wasn't published until 1973, when she was fifty-five years old. She received a modest flourish of attention and honors only lately.
--From "The Stamp of Class: Reflections on Poetry and Social Class" by Gary Lenhart, University of Michigan Press, 2006.

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McDaniel stamps her poems with an undeniable signature of simplicity of diction combined with power of suggestion.
--Laurel Speer

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True to place, true to people, yet powerfully universal, Wilma's language is as vernacular as what you might hear in a Central Valley shopping mall and her subjects as palpable as breath itself.
Gerald Haslam

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The poetry of Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel is in a special category. I define that category by quoting a Zen teaching: 'If you want to hold something in life, hold it gently as you would hold water in your hand.
Cornelia Jessey, novelist, essayist

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Her words tell massive truth worthy of a playwright who knows the language of a people. She uses it so the poetry is not lost and the truth can come in like the light of a firefly. The light goes out, but the truth stays in.
Fr. Lawrence Gerst, jazz poet

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About This Tinfoil Angel
According to (in 2007) Nevada County Librarian Steve Fjeldsted, Ms. McDaniel made these one-of-a-kind tinfoil gumwrapper angels as gifts to people she likes.

"When we were dirt-poor Okie kids, this was a Christmas tree ornament.
. . .
You had to have magic and art to survive those Dust Bowl days. We need our art to get through the toughest times."
--Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel

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