Description: In the wake of increasing gun violence and heightened national debate about race relations and social inequality, Askew's reflections could not be more relevant. With a novelist's gift for storytelling, she paints a compelling portrait of a place and its people: resilient and ruthless, decent but self-deceiving, generous yet filled with prejudice--both the best and the worst of what it means to be American.
Brief description:
Rilla Askew is a novelist, essayist, and short-story writer known for her award-winning historical fiction. Fire in Beulah, her novel about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, received the American Book Award. Her Dust Bowl novel, Harpsong, received the Oklahoma Book Award, and her essay collection, Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place, was long-listed for a PEN America Literary Award. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. To learn more about her work, visit rillaaskew.com.
Review Quotes: "In nine skillfully linked essays, Rilla Askew offers Oklahoma history as a microcosm of our national saga as Americans, insisting--and demonstrating--that our personal and state stories fall within national and global narratives. Askew's essays are particularly timely today, her themes playing out in the Black Lives Matter movement and in the violence--and intolerance and hate--seething in the 2016 presidential election campaign. Few books offer such a clear, engaging, and revealing evocation of particular Oklahoma sites and scenes, which Askew repeatedly places within the larger, national, and global frame. Most American is an important book, an artful contribution to literature that raises vital issues for Oklahoma and national conversations."--Barbara Lounsberry, author of The Art of Fact: Contemporary Artists of Nonfiction