Rilla Askew

Rilla Askew's first novel, The Mercy Seat, had its seeds in old stories about her family’s migration from the American South into Indian Territory. The book was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, was nominated for the Dublin IMPAC Prize, and received the Oklahoma Book Award and the Western Heritage Award in 1998. Fire in Beulah, her novel about the Tulsa Race Riot, received the American Book Award and the Myers Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in 2002, and was selected as the centennial book for Oklahoma’s One Book One State program in 2007. Her novel Harpsong, a love story about a wandering harmonica-playing troubadour and his young wife, received seven literary awards including the Oklahoma Book Award, the WILLA Award from Women Writing the West, the Violet Crown Award from the Writers League of Texas, and the Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. Askew received a 2009 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The citation for that award, by Allan Gurganus, reads:"Five generations of Rilla Askew's family have occupied southeastern Oklahoma. Celebrating this birthright, she has concocted of it her own Faulknerian kingdom. Askew is writing a mythic cycle, novels and stories that unsettle our view of the West's settling. In a continuous fictional mural populated with hardscrabble souls - credible, noble and flawed - Askew is completing the uncompleted crossing of the plains. Trusting prose that is disciplined, luxuriant and muscular, she is forging a chronicle as humane as it is elemental."Allan GurganusMay 20, 2009