Harpsong
by Rilla Askew

List Price: $24.95
Pages: 243
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 0806138238
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Rilla Askew was born and raised in eastern Oklahoma, where her family has lived for five generations. She grew up in the oil company town of Bartlesville in northeastern Oklahoma, but her family’s roots go deep in the Sans Bois Mountains in the southeastern part of the state. Her maternal grandfather was a sharecropper who stayed on the land when hard times came during the Great Depression, and her paternal grandfather was a coal miner, a carpenter, merchant, Baptist Deacon, one-time deputy sheriff, and general jack-of-all-trades, who also raised his family in Oklahoma in that troubled era. Askew lived many years in Tahlequah, the capital of the Cherokee Nation, much of that time in a cabin overlooking the Illinois River. She performed in the Trail of Tears outdoor drama at Tsa-la-gi near Lake Tenkiller and studied theatre at NSU in Tahlequah before relocating to Tulsa and later New York. Her first published short story, “The Gift,” appeared in Nimrod’s Oklahoma Indian Marking issue in 1989. She is married to actor Paul Austin, and they divide their time between Oklahoma, where she teaches creative writing at the University of Oklahoma, and their home in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York.

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