About Nina

Nina McConigley was born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming. Her short-story collection Cowboys and East Indians was the winner of the PEN Open Book Award and a High Plains Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, High Country News, O, Oprah Magazine, Parents, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, and The Asian American Literary Review among others. In 2019-2020, was the Walter Jackson Bate fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and was a 2022 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Creative Writing Fellowship. Her play based on Cowboys and East Indians was commissioned by the Denver Center for Performing Arts and will have its world premiere in 2026. She has two books forthcoming: her essay collection will be published by the University of Georgia Press. And her novel, How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder, is forthcoming with Pantheon in January 2026. She teaches at Colorado State University.

Photo Credit © Mandi Goyn

Long Bio

Nina McConigley is the author of the story collection Cowboys and East Indians, which was the winner of the PEN Open Book Award and winner of a High Plains Book Award. It also was on the longlist for the 2014 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. She was born in Singapore and grew up in Wyoming. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston, where she was an Inprint Brown Foundation Fellow. She also holds an MA in English from the University of Wyoming and a BA in Literature from Saint Olaf College. She is the winner of a Barthelme Memorial Fellowship in Non-Fiction and served as the Non-Fiction Editor of Gulf Coast: a Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. Her play, Owen Wister Considered was one of five plays produced in 2005 for the Edward Albee New Playwrights Festival, in which Pulitzer-prize winning playwright Lanford Wilson was the producer. She has been awarded a work-study scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2005-2009, and received a full fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center. She was granted a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in Fiction at the 2010 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. In 2011, she was a Scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and in 2014 was a Fiction fellow.

Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, O, The Oprah Magazine, Ploughshares, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Salon, American Short Fiction, Memorious, Slice Magazine, Asian American Literary Review, and Puerto del Sol, among others.

She was a recipient of the Wyoming Arts Council’s Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Writing Award and was a finalist for the 2011 Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award. She served on the board of the Wyoming Arts Council from 2014-2022. In 2019-2020, she was the Water Jackson Bate Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. In 2022, she received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

Her play, based on her short story collection, Cowboys and East Indians, was commissioned by the Denver Center for Performing Arts and will be produced and have it’s world premier in 2026.

She teaches at Colorado State University and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

Her novel, How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder will be published by Pantheon in January 2026. And her essay collection on the American West will be published by the University of Georgia in 2027.