Wellfleet Public Library

Diane Oliver died in a motorcycle accident in 1966 at the age of 22, just before graduating with her MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Nearly 50 years later, in 2024, a collection of her stories, Neighbors and Other Stories, was published by Grove Press, and Bellevue Literary Review (BLR) published her essay "The Corner" about integrating businesses on her college campus, which won her a Mademoiselle Guest Editorship in 1964. Her sister, Cheryl Oliver, and her classmate at the Writers' Workshop, Suzanne McConnell, will read from her work, describe the journey that led to publication, and open a discussion on the importance of history, especially Black history, in our threatened democracy.