Background
Askew, Rilla was born on January 26, 1951 in Poteau, Oklahoma, United States. Daughter of Paul and Carmelita Askew.
( A love story about Dust Bowl heroes who didn’t leave fo...)
A love story about Dust Bowl heroes who didn’t leave for California Harlan Singer, a harmonica-playing troubadour, shows up in the Thompson family’s yard one morning. He steals their hearts with his music, and their daughter with his charm. Soon he and his fourteen-year-old bride, Sharon, are on the road, two more hobos of the Great Depression, hitchhiking and hopping freights across the Great Plains in search of an old man and the settlement of Harlan’s long-standing debt. Finding shelter in hobo jungles and Hoovervilles, the newlyweds careen across the 1930s landscape in a giant figure eight with Oklahoma in the middle. Sharon’s growing doubts about her husband’s quest set in motion events that turn Harlan Singer into a hero while blinding her to the dark secret of his journey. A love story infused with history and folk tradition, Harpsong shows what happened to the friends and neighbors Steinbeck’s Joads left behind. In this moving, redemptive tale inspired by Oklahoma folk heroes, Rilla Askew continues her exploration of the American story. Harpsong is a novel of love and loss, of adventure and renewal, and of a wayfaring orphan’s search for homeall set to the sounds of Harlan’s harmonica. It shows us the strength and resilience of a people who, in the face of unending despair, maintain their faith in the land.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0806139285/?tag=2022091-20
(A collection of interconnecting tales recount twenty-five...)
A collection of interconnecting tales recount twenty-five years of life in the small town of Cedar, Oklahoma, incisively capturing the lives and deaths, triumphs and tragedies, dreams and desires of the town's inhabitants. A first collection.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0670842591/?tag=2022091-20
(Set during the tense days of the Oklahoma oil rush, Rilla...)
Set during the tense days of the Oklahoma oil rush, Rilla Askew's Fire in Beulah is a mesmerizing story that centers on the complex relationship between Althea Whiteside, an oil wildcatter's high-strung wife, and Graceful, her enigmatic black maid. Their juxtaposing stories—and those of others close to them—unfold against a volatile backdrop of oil-boom opulence, fear, hatred, lynchings that climax in the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, when whites burned the city's properous black community. Askew's award-winning first novel, The Mercy Seat, was praised for its astute diepiction of family bonds and the beauty of American landscape. Now she explores the American race story with the same perception.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0142000248/?tag=2022091-20
Askew, Rilla was born on January 26, 1951 in Poteau, Oklahoma, United States. Daughter of Paul and Carmelita Askew.
She graduated from the University of Tulsa with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Theatre Performance in 1980 and went on to study creative writing at Brooklyn College, where she received her Master of Fine Arts in 1989.
Rilla has taught at Syracuse University, Brooklyn College, the University of Central Oklahoma, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Arkansas, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 2003, she was inducted into the Oklahoma Writers Hall of Fame
Askew was a 2004 fellow at Civiella Ranieri in Umbertide, Italy, and a featured writer at the 2008 World Literature Today and Chinese Literature Conference in Beijing. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in Tin House, TriQuarterly, Nimrod, World Literature Today, and elsewhere.
Askew"s third novel, Harpsong (2007), is set in 1930"s Oklahoma.
Her novel about state immigration laws, "Kind of Kin," was published by Ecco in 2013. Askew is married to actor Paul Austin, and they divide their time between Oklahoma and the Catskill Mountains in upstate New New York
(Set during the tense days of the Oklahoma oil rush, Rilla...)
(A collection of interconnecting tales recount twenty-five...)
( A love story about Dust Bowl heroes who didn’t leave fo...)
Member of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists association, Authors Guild, Associate Writing Programs.
Married Paul Austin, August 6, 1983.