Nina McConigley
“ Everything I have written has some element of autobiography. Growing up a minority in Wyoming informs such a large sense of who I am, and I think have always tried to make sense of the feelings of being an outsider that I grew up with. I think those themes – race, identity, being on the margins – inform so much of my thinking, and that then comes out in my work.”
“In Cowboys and East Indians, Nina McConigley gives us Wyoming precisely the way we expect it—in landscape, sky, and animal life—and in ways we don’t. The inhabitants of this surprising, thrilling, and richly textured short story collection are unpredictable, both in their actions and identities. A cross-dresser, a kleptomaniacal foreign exchange student, a disabled mother, and others share a domestic setting—featuring trailers that look like dollhouses, motels whose rooms are identical, no matter the city they’re in—reflecting the stuckness and wanderlust of the collection’s characters, who are insider/outsiders in every sense. In these stories, McConigley has shaped a work destined to be a classic, like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Its characters—Indians in America, Americans in India, and Indian-Americans in both places—echo Vonnegut’s statement that “Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” It’s electrifying to be out on the edge with this book.”
“You don’t often read a book that shows you the world you think you know in a wholly unexpected light. Nina McConigley, a wonderful young writer, has given us a fresh and wise view of a new world–at turns delightful and sad, but surprising at every turn. I love this work, and I know it begins a fine career. Highly recommended.”
“McConigley’s deft prose takes people who don’t quite fit, who are not supposed to fit, and makes them part of the landscape…McConigley writes about Wyoming with the same mythic nostalgia that many Southern writers write about the South.”
Born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming, Nina McConigley is the author of the award-winning story collection, Cowboys and East Indians (Curtis Brown Unlimited, 2015), winner of a 2014 PEN Open Book Award, a High Plains Book Award and named one of 2014's Best Prize Winning books by O, Oprah Magazine. Her debut novel, How to Commit A Postcolonial Murder, will be published by Pantheon Books in early 2026. Her play based on Cowboys and East Indians was commissioned by the Denver Center for Performing Arts and will premiere in early 2026.
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 was a 2022 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Creative Writing Fellowship. She has an essay collection about the American West forthcoming in 2025 from the University of Georgia Press.
She was named by Glamour Magazine one of '50 Phenomenal Women 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 been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and The Best New American Voices, among others.
In an interview she was asked about the challenges of growing up so removed from Indian culture in Wyoming. She responded: “Growing up, I didn’t know any different world. But I did know I was pretty much the only brown face in any room I was in. I think it always made me feel like an outsider, and that informed much of my writing and thinking about race. The rural immigrant experience is something completely different. There are no Indian grocery stores, Indian restaurants or just other Indians – so much of what I knew of Indian culture was through my mother.”
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.
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