An Evening with Nina McConigley

Born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming, Nina McConigley is the author of the novel How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder (Pantheon, 2026). She is also the author of the award-winning story collection Cowboys and East Indians (Curtis Brown Unlimited, 2015), winner of a 2014 PEN Open Book Award and a High Plains Book Award. Her play based on Cowboys and East Indians was commissioned by the Denver Center for Performing Arts. She has an essay collection about the American West forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press.

Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, O, Oprah Magazine, Parents, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, and The Asian American Literary Review, among others. In 2019–2020 she was the Walter Jackson Bate fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and in 2022 she received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

She was named by Glamour Magazine as one of “50 Phenomenal Women of the Year Who Are Making a Difference” in 2014. She’s been a fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, has held scholarships to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Vermont Studio Center, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, among other honors.

She holds an MFA from the University of Houston and an MA from the University of Wyoming. She lives in Fort Collins, CO, with her family and teaches at Colorado State University.