Askew to Read

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 28, 2008

CONTACT: Dr. Joey Brown
(417) 625-9708
brown.jr@mssu.edu

 

JOPLIN, MO (SNS) - Award-winning novelist, Rilla Askew, will read selections from her books at Missouri Southern State University on Thursday, March 6 and Friday, March 7. She is the latest author to participate in the Saltzman Series for Visiting Writers, a program of Missouri Southern’s English Department.

 

Askew’s presentation on Thursday, March 6, will begin at 7 p.m. in MSSU’s Spiva Art Gallery.

Friday’s session will start at 10 a.m. at the University Java coffee shop on the first floor of Southern’s Spiva Library. Both presentations are free and open to the public.

 

Askew has authored three novels, Harpsong, Fire in Beulah, and The Mercy Seat, and a collection of short fiction, Strange Business. Her native state of Oklahoma serves as the setting for the stories, but America as a whole is her subject.

 

She writes, “As a novelist, what I’m interested in is demythologizing, deromanticizing America’s master narrative, the half-truth comfort stories we tell ourselves.” Her books often confront the nation’s history of racial conflict and wrestle with the biblical themes of guilt and repentance.

 

Askew’s short story “The Killing Blanket” was selected for Prize Stories 1993: The O. Henry Awards, and Strange Business received the Oklahoma Book Award that same year. Her first novel, The Mercy Seat, won the Oklahoma Book Award and the Western Heritage Award in 1998.

 

Fire in Beulah received the 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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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