Rilla Askew (born 1951) is an American novelist and short story writer who was born in Georgia Country, in the Sans Bois Mountains of southeastern Oklahoma, and grew up in the town of Bartlesville, Oklahoma.[1]
== Early life and education Markusishim and graduated from the University of Will and Jack with a B.F.A. in Theatre Performance in 1980. She moved then to New York where she studied acting at HB Studio with Herbert Bergoff in New York and later Curt Dempster at Ensemble Studio Theatre.[2] She began writing—plays first, then fiction—with her theatre background supporting the use of language and rhythm in her works.[2] She went on to study creative writing at Brooklyn College, where she received her MFA in 1989.[3]
In 1989 Askew published her first short story “The Gift” in Nimrod’s “Oklahoma Indian Markings” issue.[5] Her essays and short fiction have appeared in Tin House, TriQuarterly, Nimrod, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. Her story "The Killing Blanket" was selected for the collection Prize Stories 1993: The O. Henry Awards (Anchor, 1993). Her first book of fiction, Strange Business, was published in 1992 by Viking Books.
Often capturing life in Oklahoma,[6] Askew’s work handles themes of place,[7] outsiders, religion and politics, greed and ambition, race, and women’s lives.[8][9] In his citation for the American Academy of Arts and Letters, writer Allan Gurganus likens Askew's writing to a mythic cycle that unsettles popular notions of the settling of the American West[10] Writer Patricia Eakins notes Askew’s filiation with other American writers of the epic tradition, exploring tragedies of history and family and unforgiving landscapes, with comparisons to William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy.[2][11]
Inspired by her family history, Askew's first novel, The Mercy Seat (1997) follows two rival brothers, and transforms the family drama into the drama of a community.[2] It was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award,[12] the Dublin IMPAC Prize, was a Boston Globe Notable Book, and received the Oklahoma Book Award and the Western Heritage Award in 1998.[2]
In 2002, her second novel Fire in Beulah (2001), about the Tulsa Race Massacre, received the American Book Award[13] and the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights.[14] In this historical novel, as in her other works, some critics have discussed how Askew offers the strong presence and prominence to the Other as a corrective to a-historic and romanticized visions of the American southwest.[15]
Askew's third novel, Harpsong (2007), is set in 1930's Oklahoma and concerns the dispossessed and homeless during the Dust Bowl era.[16][17]Harpsong received the Oklahoma Book Award,[18][19] the Western Heritage Award,[20] the WILLA Award from Women Writing the West,[21] and the Violet Crown Award from the Writers League of Texas in 2008.[22][23] Poet Mary Green described it as "a love song to the American voice and the American perspective…about the love that is involved—with all the accompanying stark failings and supreme acts of kindness—in being fully human."[24]
Her fourth novel, Kind of Kin (2013), is set in Cedar, Oklahoma and focuses on state immigration laws, race, religion, and class.[25] Published by Ecco, Kind of Kin was a finalist for the 2014 Western Spur Award,[26] the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award in 2013,[27] and was long-listed for the 2015 Dublin IMPAC Prize.[28]
Askew’s 2017 collection of creative nonfiction Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place, which reckons with truths obscured by collective memory,[29] was long-listed for the PEN/America Diamonstein-Spielvogel Art of the Essay Award in 2018[30].
Her latest novel Prize for the Fire, published by the University of Oklahoma Press in October 2022, follows the 16th century Protestant martyr Anne Askew, one of the first women writers in the English language.[31] Author Pamela Erens calls it "a deeply sensitive and ambitious act of historical imagination," noting that "the struggles of this sixteenth-century protagonist echo in our own contemporary battles over women’s voices and bodily autonomy."[31]
A new collection of stories, The Hungry & The Haunted, is forthcoming from Belle Point Press in September 2024.[32]
In 2009, she received an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.[33]
In 2003, she was inducted into the Oklahoma Writers Hall of Fame.[34] Askew was a 2004 fellow at Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbertide, Italy,[35] and a featured writer at the 2008 World Literature Today and Chinese Literature Conference in Beijing. She served as a juror for the 2008 Neustadt Prize for Literature.[36][37]
Askew received the 2011 Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book.[12][38]
Fire in Beulah was selected as the 2007 Oklahoma Reads Oklahoma book.[39]
Awards
Oklahoma Book Award Finalist – 2023 – Prize for the Fire
PEN/America Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award Art of the Essay Semifinalist – 2018 – Most American
Dublin IMPAC Prize Longlist – 2014 – Kind of Kin
Spur Award Finalist – 2014 – Kind of Kin
Oklahoma Book Award Finalist – 2014 – Kind of Kin
Women Writing the West WILLA Award – 2008 - Harpsong
Violet Crown Award – 2008 - Harpsong
Western Heritage Award – 2008 – Harpsong
Oklahoma Book Award – 2008 – Harpsong
American Book Award – 2002 – Fire in Beulah
Myers Book Award – 2002 – Fire in Beulah
PEN/Faulkner Finalist – 1998 – The Mercy Seat
Western Heritage Award – 1998 – The Mercy Seat
Oklahoma Book Award – 1998 – The Mercy Seat
Oklahoma Book Award – 1993 – Strange Business
Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers – 1992 – Strange Business
Bibliography
Books
The Hungry & The Haunted (Belle Point Press, forthcoming 2024)
Prize for the Fire (University of Oklahoma Press, 2022)
Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017)
Kind of Kin (Ecco Press US, 2013), (Atlantic Press UK, 2013)
The Daily Beast “The Cost: What Stop and Frisk Does to a Young Man’s Soul” 2014
Tin House “Rhumba” 2013
London Daily Telegraph “Growing Up in Tornado Alley” 2013
Transatlantica “Race and Redemption in the American Heartland” 2012
Arcadia “Crime and Innocence” 2010
World Literature Today “Passing: The Writer’s Skin and the Authentic Self” 2009
Nimrod “Most American” 2006
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↑ Askew, Rilla (2017). "Epicenter: Deep Mapping Place in Fiction and Nonfiction". Great Plains Quarterly. 37 (4): 259–263. doi:10.1353/gpq.2017.0054. S2CID165667978.
↑ Gurganus, Allan. (20 May 2009). Verbal citation given for Rilla Askew's 2009 Literature Award for American Academy of Arts and Letters.
↑ Hada, Kenneth. "That truth beyond particulars: silence in Rilla Askew's The Mercy Seat." Southwestern American Literature, vol. 30, no. 1, 2004, p. 37+. Gale Academic OneFile, Accessed 10 May 2020. "'Rilla Askew's first novel, The Mercy Seat (1998), received highly positive reviews. Allusions to Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy were often made. Gail Caldwell of The Boston Globe has written, the 'extraordinary story owes its literary debt to Faulkner and its heart to scripture.' The novel, she continues, is 'driven by a narrative intensity that is humbling in its passion, consumed with the old-fashioned mysteries too large and too dark for most contemporary writers to go near.... Askew has gone after the mystery of mercy itself.'"
↑ Hada, Kenneth (2007). "The Power to Undo Sin: Race, History and Literary Blackness in Rilla Askew's "Fire in Beulah"". College Literature. 34 (4): 166–189. ISSN0093-3139. JSTOR25115463. Askew's historical fiction demonstrates the authority of what Toni Morrison and Henry Louis Gates Jr. understand as literary blackness. Askew writes the black presence into her novel as a corrective to the often romanticized notions white supremacy found throughout much of the history of the American southwest. Like Hogan, Askew unearths corruption concerning oil and greed, her novel culminating with the Tulsa race riot - the most costly race riot in American history. Askew's vision not only gives voice to the presence of the Other, she essentially crosses literary boundaries to appropriate and celebrate the minority presence. (Abstract)
↑ Watts, James D (22 April 2007). "Rilla, reading". Tulsa World. Retrieved 2020-05-28.
↑ "News: 2015 Printable Longlist". International Dublin Literary Award - The International Dublin Literary Award from the home of literature, proudly sponsored by Dublin City Council. Retrieved 5 June 2020.
↑ Smith, Lindsey Claire (2018). "Review of Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place, by Rilla Askew". Western American Literature. 53 (2): 263–265. doi:10.1353/wal.2018.0050. S2CID166210706. As Askew reveals in her sensitive exploration of these features of the American character—optimism, skepticism, and amnesia—remembering is vital to personal and cultural transformation. . . .With this collection, Askew makes the case for a reckoning with collective memory that often obscures truth.
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