Rilla Askew received a 2009 Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She's the author of five novels, two books of stories, and a collection of creative nonfiction. Her first novel, The Mercy Seat, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, a Boston Globe Notable Book, and received the Oklahoma Book Award and the Western Heritage Award in 1998. Her seminal novel about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, Fire in Beulah, received the American Book Award and the Myers Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in 2002. Askew's third novel, Harpsong, received six literary awards, including 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. Her novel Kind of Kin, a story about the complicated bonds of family, faith, and state immigration laws, was a finalist for the Western Spur Award, the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, and was long-listed for the Dublin IMPAC Prize. Her most recent novel, Prize for the Fire, an historical biographical novel about the Early Modern writer and martyr Anne Askew, was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award. A 2004 fellow at Civiella Ranieri in Umbertide, Italy, Askew received the 2011 Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oklahoma Center for the Book. Askew's collection of creative nonfiction, Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place, spotlights the complex history of her home state from the Trail of Tears to the Tulsa Race Massacre to the Murrah Federal Building bombing; the book was longlisted for PEN America's award for the art of the essay. Askew's essay "Convergence," published in AGNI Magazine, received a 2027 Pushcart Prize.