FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                                                        March 5, 2008

‘OKLAHOMA READS’ AUTHOR TO SPEAK AT NORTHWESTERN LIBRARY

            Rilla Askew, author of Fire in Beulah, will be a guest speaker at 7 p.m., Thursday, March 13, in the J.W. Martin Library at Northwestern Oklahoma State University. The novel was selected as the Oklahoma Reads Oklahoma Book for 2007. The event is co-sponsored by the Alva Public Library.

            Fire in Beulah is set during the tumultuous days leading up to the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot. It tells the story of two families—one white and one black—during Oklahoma’s oil boom days and details the complex relationship between the high strung wife of an oil wildcatter and her enigmatic black maid Graceful.

            In addition to being the fourth and final title for the centennial Oklahoma Reads project, the book received the 2002 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and the Myers Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights.

            Askew’s first novel The Mercy Seat was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and received the Oklahoma Book Award and Western Heritage Award in 1998. Her collection of stories Strange Business received the Oklahoma Book Award in 1993. The story “The Killing Blanket” was selected for Prize Stories 1993: The O. Henry Awards.

            Her latest novel, Harpsong, was published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2007.

            All of Askew’s writing focuses on Oklahoma and its people. Born in the Sans Bois Mountains of southeastern Oklahoma, she graduated from the University of Tulsa in 1980 and went on to study creative writing at Brooklyn College where she received her master’s of fine arts in 1989.

            Askew has taught creative writing at Brooklyn College, University of Central Oklahoma, Syracuse University and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is married to actor Paul Austin, and they divide their time between Oklahoma, where she teaches spring semesters at the University of Oklahoma, and the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York.

-NW-

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