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Rilla Askew is an American novelist and short story writer who was born in the Sans Bois Mountains of southeastern Oklahoma, and grew up in the town of Bartlesville, Oklahoma. She graduated from the University of Tulsa with a B.F.A. in Theatre Performance in 1980 and went on to study creative writing at Brooklyn College, where she received her MFA in 1989. Rilla has taught at Syracuse University, Brooklyn College, the University of Central Oklahoma, the University of Oklahoma and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
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. In 2009, she received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in a variety of journals, and her story "The Killing Blanket" was selected for Prize Stories 1993: The O. Henry Awards.
Askew's first novel The Mercy Seat was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dublin IMPAC Prize, was a Boston Globe Notable Book, and received the Oklahoma Book Award and the Western Heritage Award in 1998. In 2002, her second novel Fire in Beulah, 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. Askew's third novel, Harpsong, is set in 1930's Oklahoma. Harpsong received the Oklahoma Book Award, the Western Heritage Award, the WILLA Award from Women Writing the West, and the Violet Crown Award from the Writers League of Texas in 2008.
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