Rilla Askew

Rilla Askew is the author of short fiction, essays, and novels. Her first novel, The Mercy Seat, was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dublin IMPAC Prize, and received the Oklahoma Book Award and the Western Heritage Award in 1998. Fire in Beulah, a novel about the Tulsa Race Massacre, received the American Book Award. Her story “The Killing Blanket” was selected for Prize Stories 1993: The O. Henry Awards. Askew’s most recent book, a memoir in essays, is Most American.

Summer 2020

Cataclysm

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...
January 2013

Kind of Kin by 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...
Passing: The Writer’s Skin and the Authentic Self

July 2009 WLT When I Google my name online and click on result seventy-two, say—way down past the sites featuring remaindered copies of my books for as little as one penny plus shipping and...