Nina McConigley (born 1975) is an Indian-Irish-American fiction writer and playwright known for her focus on the American West, particularly the immigrant experience in rural settings. Her short story collection, Cowboys and East Indians , won the 2014 PEN/Open Book Award [1] and the High Plains Book Award. [2]
Nina Swamidoss McConigley was born to an Irish father and an Indian mother in Singapore. She was raised in Casper, Wyoming, after her family moved there when she was a baby. McConigley holds a BA in English from Saint Olaf College, an MA in English from the University of Wyoming, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston.
McConigley's work centers on Wyoming and the American West, often exploring the rural immigrant experience. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, Orion, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, High Country News, O, The Oprah Magazine, Parents, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, and The Asian American Literary Review.
Her quarterly column Township and Range for High Country News, [3] launched in 2022, was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in 2024.
McConigley's works have gained notable recognition. Her play adaptation of Cowboys and East Indians was commissioned by the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, with a world premiere set for 2026. [4] She has two forthcoming books: How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder (Pantheon, 2026) and an essay collection with Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction (University of Georgia Press).
McConigley has received numerous awards and fellowships for her work, including:
Nina McConigley taught at the University of Wyoming for 13 years and now resides in Fort Collins, Colorado, where she teaches at Colorado State University [7] and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is the daughter of Nimi McConigley, a former Wyoming state legislator. McConigley holds dual citizenship in the United States and Ireland.
Lia Purpura is an American poet, writer and educator. She is the author of four collections of poems, four collections of essays and one collection of translations. Her poems and essays appear in AGNI, The Antioch Review, DoubleTake, FIELD, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Orion Magazine, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares. Southern Review, and many other magazines.
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Marilyn Krysl was an American writer of short stories and poetry who is known for her quirky and witty storytelling. She has published four short story collections along with seven collections of poetry. She has won several awards for her work, including the 2008 Richard Sullivan Prize for short fiction for her collection of short stories, Dinner With Osama, which is a sociopolitical satire of post-9/11 America. Krysl also submitted work to The Atlantic journal, The Nation journal, and The New Republic journal, as well as being an editor of Many Mountains Moving: A Literary Journal of Diverse, Contemporary Voices along with Naomi Horii.
Wendy Brenner is an American writer of fiction and nonfiction and an Associate Professor at University of North Carolina Wilmington (1997-2023), where she won the university's Graduate Mentor Award for her work with MFA students. Brenner is the author of two books, the first of which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her short stories and essays have appeared in such magazines as Allure, Seventeen, Travel & Leisure, The Oxford American, The Sun (magazine), Ploughshares, and Mississippi Review, and have been anthologized in The Best American Essays, Best American Magazine Writing, and New Stories From the South, as well as other anthologies. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for her fiction, and is a Contributing Editor for The Oxford American. In 2016, she was named one of the "Queens of Nonfiction: 56 Women Journalists Everyone Should Read" on New York magazine's "The Cut" blog.
Emily Raboteau is an American fiction writer, essayist, and professor of creative writing at the City College of New York.
Rusty Morrison is an American poet and publisher. She received a BA in English from Mills College in Oakland, California, an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Saint Mary's College of California in Moraga, California, and an MA in Education from California State University, San Francisco. She has taught in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco and was Poet in Residence at Saint Mary’s College in 2009. She has also served as a visiting poet at a number of colleges and universities, including the University of Redlands, the University of Arizona, Boise State University, Marylhurst University, and Millikin University. In 2001, Morrison and her husband, Ken Keegan, founded Omnidawn Publishing in Richmond, California, and continue to work as co-publishers. She contracted Hepatitis C in her twenties but, like most people diagnosed with this disease, did not experience symptoms for several years. Since then, a focus on issues relating to disability has developed as an area of interest in her writing.
Melissa Febos is an American writer and professor. She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Whip Smart (2010) and the essay collections Abandon Me (2017) and Girlhood (2021).
Brenda Wineapple is an American non-fiction writer, literary critic, and essayist who has written several books on nineteenth-century American writers.
Pam Houston is an American author of short stories, novels and essays. She is best known for her first book, Cowboys Are My Weakness (1992), which has been translated into nine languages, and which won the 1993 Western States Book Award. Also, "Cowboys Are My Weakness" was named a New York Times Notable Book in 1992.
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Jaquira Díaz is a Puerto Rican fiction writer, essayist, journalist, cultural critic, and professor. She is the author of Ordinary Girls, which received a Whiting Award in Nonfiction, a Florida Book Awards Gold Medal, was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Prize Finalist. She has written for The Atlantic, Time (magazine), The Best American Essays, Tin House, The Sun, The Fader, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Longreads, and other places. She was an editor at theKenyon Reviewand a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.In 2022, she held the Mina Hohenberg Darden Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University's MFA program and a Pabst Endowed Chair for Master Writers at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She has taught creative writing at Colorado State University's MFA program, Randolph College's low-residency MFA program, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Kenyon College. Díaz lives in New York with her spouse, British writer Lars Horn, and is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University.
Cowboys and East Indians: Stories is a 2013 short story collection by Nina McConigley that was the winner of the 2014 PEN literary award.
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