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. She was born in Singapore and grew up in Wyoming. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston. She also holds an MA in English from the University of Wyoming and a BA in Literature from Saint Olaf College. She has been awarded a work-study scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and has been both a Scholar and Fiction fellow at Bread Loaf. She received a full fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center and was also granted a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in Fiction at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, O: The Oprah Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Salon, American Short Fiction, and The Asian American Literary Review among others.
She was a recipient of the Wyoming Arts Council’s Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Writing Award and a finalist for a National Magazine Award for her columns in High Country News. 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). She served on the board of the Wyoming Arts Council from 2014-2022.
Her play, Cowboys and East Indians was commissioned by the Denver Center for Performing Arts and had a staged reading at the Colorado New Play Summit in 2024.
She teaches at Colorado State University and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Two books are forthcoming: her novel, How to Commit A Postcolonial Murder from Pantheon Books in 2026, and her essay collection with Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction from the University of Georgia Press.