Diane Oliver Author

Diane Oliver (1943 - 1966) was born in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her father was a school teacher and her mother a piano teacher. After graduating from a segregated public high school, she attended Women's College (which later became the University of North Carolina at Greensboro) and was the Managing Editor of The Carolinian, the student newspaper. She published four short stories in her lifetime and two more posthumously: 'Key to the City' and 'Neighbors' published in The Sewanee Review in 1966; 'Health Service', 'Traffic Jam' and 'Mint Juleps Not Served Here' in Negro Digest in 1965, 1966 and 1967; and 'The Closet on the Top Floor' in Southern Writing in the Sixties in 1966. 'Neighbors' was a recipient of an O. Henry Award in 1967. Diane began graduate work at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop and was awarded the MFA degree posthumously days after her death in a motorcycle accident in 1966, aged just 22.

Tayari Jones is the New York Times-bestselling author of four novels.An American Marriage (2018) was an Oprah's Book Club Selection and championed by Barack Obama as well as being awarded the Women's Prize for Fiction and published in two dozen countries. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, Jones has also been a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the US Artist, NEA and Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowships. Her third novel, Silver Sparrow, was added to the NEA Big Read Library of classics in 2016. Jones is a graduate of Spelman College, University of Iowa, and Arizona State University. She is currently an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University and the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University.