Sister Vayda's Song

Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel's poems bear powerful witness to one of the nation's most dramatic sagas, the Dustbowl exodus of the 1930's Depression era, and chronicle the lives of workers in California's hot Central Valley towns over the decades. Born to an Oklahoma sharecropping family, and part Cherokee, McDaniel began writing when she was eight, and has kept on through a lifetime of working on farms, even when poverty forced her to write on old envelopes and brown paper bags.