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

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 (thought, thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral t ...

and writer of prose from

northern California Northern California (commonly shortened to NorCal) is a geocultural region that comprises the northern portion of the U.S. state of California, spanning the northernmost 48 of the state's List of counties in California, 58 counties. Northern Ca ...

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 that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

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

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

Oakland Oakland is a city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S. state of California. It is the county seat and most populous city in Alameda County, with a population of 440,646 in 2020. A major West Coast port, Oakland is ...

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. Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly known as Washington or D.C., is the capital city and federal district of the United States. The city is on the Potomac River, across from Virginia, and shares land borders with ...

while organizing for the

Congress of Industrial Organizations The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was a federation of Labor unions in the United States, unions that organized workers in industrial unionism, industrial unions in the United States and Canada from 1935 to 1955. Originally created in ...

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 and 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, includ ...

.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 Prizes () are 23 annual awards given by Columbia University in New York City for achievements in the United States in "journalism, arts and letters". They were established in 1917 by the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made his fo ...

. *

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are Grant (money), grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon Guggenheim, Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon indiv ...

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