Norma Jane Bumgarner

A lifelong resident of Oklahoma, Bumgarner grew up hearing stories about the most radical of Oklahoma socialists and their peculiar colony where her grandparents met. In the years before she decided to use these stories as the backdrop for her novels, she helped her grandmother's younger sister research and document this nearly forgotten piece of Oklahoma history. The result was “The Milton Co-Operative Colony: From Utopia to Ghost Town, 1913-1916,” Chronicles of Oklahoma, Spring 2000.

Although the central characters in Green Persimmon and in The Green Corn are fictional, the background characters and events are based on those memories, recollections of a woman who lived the events and loved talking about them.

Bumgarner, grandmother of eight young adults, has a B.A. and M.A. in Latin and M.A. in professional writing. Before retiring, she taught grammar at the University of Oklahoma and hired out her services writing family histories.