Rilla Askew

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Photo by Shevaun Williams

Rilla Askew is the author of five novels, a book of stories, and a collection of creative nonfiction, Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place. She received a 2009 Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and teaches at the University of Oklahoma. Her novel about the Tulsa Race Massacre, Fire in Beulah, received the American Book Award in 2002. Her most recent novel, Prize for the Fire, appeared in October 2022.

  • The cover to The Hungry and the Haunted by Rilla Askew

    The Hungry and the Haunted by Rilla Askew

    Rilla Askew
    Fort Smith, Arkansas. Belle Point Press. 2024. 160 pages. It’s been thirty-two years, five novels, and an essay collection since Rilla Askew published Strange Business, her debut shor…
  • The cover to Prize for the Fire: A Novel by Rilla Askew

    Prize for the Fire: A Novel by Rilla Askew

    Rilla Askew
    Norman. University of Oklahoma Press. 2022. 369 pages. IS MARTYRDOM FATED, a choice, both? Thus the parameters of Rilla Askew’s new novel, whose title and prologue leave no doubt of t…
  • A tile composed of four covers from the reading list below. Text reads: World Literature Today. What to Read Now. Historical Biographical Fiction, by Rilla Askew.

    Historical Biographical Fiction

    November 2022
    Rilla Askew
    When I first read Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, I’d been working on a novel about Tudor-era martyr and writer Anne Askew for over a decade. My head buried in research, I’d been struggling toward…
  • A collage of artifacts related to the Tulsa Race Massacre

    Undreaming Dreamland

    Spring 2021
    Rilla Askew
    Photos courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society, Ella Mahler Collection / University of Tulsa, McFarlin Library How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream, With half-shut eyes ever to see…
  • A black and white photograph of a young couple, seen from outside somberly looking at the photographer out a bay window

    Cataclysm

    Summer 2020
    Rilla Askew
    Photo: Quarantine portrait. Tulsa, Oklahoma. March 22, 2020, by Joseph Rushmore A writer of historical fiction, located in the US heartland, considers the pandemic’s languid creep and an…

  • Kind of Kin by Rilla Askew

    Rilla Askew
    New York. Ecco / HarperCollins. 2013. ISBN 9780062198792 Rilla Askew’s fourth novel is a brilliant evocation of Heraclitus’s axiom that character is fate—an ironic evocation she both confirms and turn…