Diana O’Hehir

1922-2021

Poet, novelist and teacher Diana O’Hehir, an important member of the Bay Area’s literary community, passed away January 19 at her home in a San Francisco senior residence, after a brief illness. She was 98. She taught English and creative writing at Mills College in Oakland for many years and was the author of at least nine collections of poetry and five novels — the first of which, “I Wish This War Were Over,” was a Pulitzer nominee in 1984.

Born Diana Farnham in Virginia in 1922, she came west at age one and spent her formative years in Berkeley. She attended UC Berkeley but did not graduate, leaving to spend several years in Washington, D.C., as a labor organizer and political activist, where she met Mel Fiske, who became her first husband. (And, in fact, later her third husband.) After they parted in the early 1950s, she enrolled in graduate school at Johns Hopkins, returning to Berkeley in 1958 after marrying the Irish scholar Brendan O’Hehir.

She joined the faculty at Mills College in 1961 and taught there until 1993, eventually earning a PhD from Johns Hopkins in 1970 (although she never completed an undergraduate degree). She began publishing poetry in journals in the early 1970s and her first of many collections, “Summoned,” won the Nevins Award in 1975. After the end of her second marriage, she met Mel Fiske again in the late ‘80s. They reunited and eventually remarried, spending more than 20 years together living in the East Bay, San Francisco and Marin. After his death in 2008, she moved to a San Francisco senior residence, where she continued to write poetry and personal memoir into the last weeks of her life. She is survived by her sons, Michael Fiske of Vacaville and Andrew O’Hehir of New York City, three grandchildren, a large extended family and innumerable friends, colleagues, readers and former students. A public memorial will be held at a later date.