Diana Farnham O'Hehir (May 23, 1922 – January 19, 2021) was a

poet A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator ( thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral or writte ...

and writer of prose from

northern California Northern California (colloquially known as NorCal) is a geographic and cultural region that generally comprises the northern portion of the U.S. state of California. Spanning the state's northernmost 48 counties, its main population centers incl ...

Biography

She was born in Lexington in 1922, though she moved to

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

with her father the next year. She taught from 1961 to 1992 at

Mills College Mills College at Northeastern University is a private college in Oakland, California and part of Northeastern University's global university system. Mills College was founded as the Young Ladies Seminary in 1852 in Benicia, California; it was ...

Oakland Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third largest city overall in the Bay A ...

where she was Aurelia Henry Reinhardt Professor Emerita of American Literature. She was married three times, twice to the same man, who she remarried 35 years after their divorce, after her marriage to her second husband, and their later divorce. She outlived both husbands, and died at the age of 98 in 2021, having published five novels and five collections of poetry. She first married her first husband, Mel Fiske, a writer and progressive who she met in

Washington D.C. ) , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from top left: the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, United States Capitol, Logan Circle, Jefferson Memorial, White House, Adams Morgan, Na ...

while organizing for the

Congress of Industrial Organizations The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was a federation of unions that organized workers in industrial unions in the United States and Canada from 1935 to 1955. Originally created in 1935 as a committee within the American Federation of ...

in 1946, and they had one son together. However, they eventually divorced, as the politics of the McCarthy era made O'Hehir wish to move away from their leftist political stances, while Fiske was committed to this political cause, as she recounted to the Marin Independent Journal in 2005 in an article about her most recent books. In 1956, she was remarried, to Brendan O'Hehir, with whom she had another son, and she lived with O'Hehir until they divorced in 1986. Shortly after this, she reconnected with Fiske, as recounted in a 1999 essay in

salon.com ''Salon'' is an American politically progressive/ liberal news and opinion website created in 1995. It publishes articles on U.S. politics, culture, and current events. Content and coverage ''Salon'' covers a variety of topics, including re ...

.If at first...
/ref> O'Hehir and Fiske lived together until Fiske's death, in 2008. Though not the most prolific, her works have been highly regarded by critics, with several receiving awards.

Works

*''Summoned'' (poetry), 1976 *''The Power to Change Geography'' (poetry), 1979 *''I Wish This War Were Over '' (novel), 1984 *''Home Free'' (poetry), 1988 *''The Bride Who Ran Away'' (novel), 1988 *''Mothersongs: Poems For, By, and About Mothers'' (anthology edited with Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar), 1995 *''Spells For Not Dying Again'' (poetry), 1996 *''Murder Never Forgets'' (novel), 2005 *''Erased from Memory'' (novel), 2006 *''Dark Aura'' (novel), 2008

Awards

*''Summoned'': Devins Award from the University of Missouri Press, 1976. *''I Wish This War Were Over'', was short-listed for the

Pulitzer Prize The Pulitzer Prize () is an award for achievements in newspaper, magazine, online journalism, literature, and musical composition within the United States. It was established in 1917 by provisions in the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made h ...

. *

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

in 1986. *''Spells For Not Dying Again'' Northern California Book Award for poetry, 1997.

References

External links

Official author siteOfficial site for her mystery novelsQ&A from the same site
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ohehir, Diana 1922 births 2021 deaths 20th-century American novelists 21st-century American novelists American women novelists American women poets Mills College faculty Poets from California 20th-century American women writers 21st-century American women writers 20th-century American poets 21st-century American poets Poets from Virginia People from Lexington, Virginia American women academics