Diane Alene Oliver (1943–66) grew up in the black southern middle class of the 1940s and 1950s in Charlotte, North Carolina—an experience she would later write about in her fictional short stories. In 1960, she enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and five years later won a scholarship and matriculated to the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. She published four short stories before dying tragically, at age 22, in an automobile accident just days before graduating. The University of Iowa conferred Oliver’s MFA degree posthumously.