In 2010, Oliver co-founded Paper Lantern Lit, a literary “incubator”/ development company now called Glasstown Entertainment with Razorbill editor and poet Lexa Hillyer.
However, writing was not Oliver's only passion; she also enjoyed taking ballet, drawing, painting, making collages, singing, acting, experimenting with cooking, and (as she put it), "(trying) to spend my time being as creative and useless as possible."
Oliver's first middle-grade book, about a girl who is visited by a ghost who says her dead father is stuck in Limbo and that only she can help him over, was published on September 1, 2011.
[8] Her second middle-grade book, The Spindlers, tells the story of a young girl, Liza, who travels into a fantastical underworld to rescue her younger brother from the sinister creatures.
The action revolves around the mysterious and dangerous game, "Panic," which takes place every summer after graduation and involves a series of adrenaline pumping challenges that become progressively more life-threatening to weed out the weak and find out who is the most fearless of all.
The winner receives a large sum of money (the year that Heather and Dodge play, the prize is $67,000), which is a chance to escape the poverty in which they all live.
Vanishing Girls tells the story of two sisters, Dara and Nick, who deal with the aftermath of a disastrous car accident that has put a strain on their once-inseparable relationship.
In 2019, she became the president of Glasstown West, the company's film and TV division, and she simultaneously began work on Hookline, an aggregate platform of social AR iconography.
[10] Her parents are both literature professors, and from a very young age, she was encouraged to make up stories, draw, paint, dance around in costumes, and spend much of her time essentially living imaginatively.
She pursued literature and philosophy at the University of Chicago and then moved back to New York to attend NYU’s MFA program in creative writing.