Rilla Askew

Rilla Askew was born in the Sans Bois Mountains of southeastern Oklahoma, where her family has lived for five generations. She graduated from the University of Tulsa in 1980 and went on to study creative writing at Brooklyn College, where she received her MFA in 1989. Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of literary magazines, and her story "The Killing Blanket" was selected for Prize Stories 1993: The O. Henry Awards. Her collection of stories, Strange Business, received the Oklahoma Book Award in 1993. Askew's first novel, The Mercy Seat, was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and received the Oklahoma Book Award and the Western Heritage Award in 1998. Her novel Fire in Beulah received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and the Myers Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights. Her most recent novel Harpsong has received the Oklahoma Books Award and and the Western Heritage Award for Best Novel of 2008. She has taught creative writing at Brooklyn College, the University of Central Oklahoma, Syracuse University, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Askew is married to actor Paul Austin and they divide their time between Oklahoma, where she teaches spring semesters at the University of Oklahoma, and the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York.

Reading and Discussion Guides for HARPSONG, FIRE IN BEULAH and THE MERCY SEAT can be reached by clicking on the appropriate Quick Link on the left.

"Rilla Askew is known for the energy, emotional range and formal complexity of her work in long-form fiction. She writes with vivid dramatic assurance and rich compassion of the events of Oklahoma, and indeed, American history, her scope both intimate and epic. She tackles brutal issues of race and culture without pulling punches, yet she evokes the essential humanity of all her characters. Sometimes terrifying, sometimes lyric, sometimes funny, always engaging, her fiction like Faulkner's explores the related tragedies of family and history. As in the work of Cormac McCarthy, Askew shows how an unforgiving landscape resonates in human fate."
--Patricia Eakins, author of The Hungry Girls and Other Stories and The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste