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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...