Nina McConigley Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Story Collections

Nina McConigley is a published American author was was born in Singapore but grew up in the U.S. in Wyoming.

Nina attended the University of Houston and graduated with her MFA in Creative Writing, while also being an Inprint Brown Foundation Fellow. Nina has an MA in English from the University of Wyoming and has a BA in Literature from Saint Olaf College.

The author won the Barthelme Memorial Fellowship in Non-Fiction and was the Non-Fiction Editor of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. She wrote the play Owen Wister Considered, which was one out of five produced for the Edward Albee New Playwrights Festival in 2005, with playwright Lanford Wilson serving as the producer.

Nina received a work-study scholarship to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2005-2009. She also received a full fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center. Nina was granted a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in Fiction at the 2010 Sewanee Writers’ conference. Nina was a Scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2011 and was a Fiction fellow in 2014.

Her writing has been featured in places such as O, Orion, The New York Times, The Oprah Magazine, Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Alaska Quarterly Review, Salon, Memorious, Slice Magazine, American Short Fiction, Puerto del Sol, and the Asian American Literary Review.

McConigley also received the Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Writing Award from the Wyoming Arts Council. The author was a finalist for the 2011 Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award. The author also served on the Wyoming Arts Council board from 2014-2022. From 2019-2020, Nina was the Water Jackson Bate Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) in 2022.

She resides in Fort Collins, Colorado with her family. Nina also has dual citizenship in the U.S. and Ireland.

Nina is the author of the quarterly column ‘Township and Range’ for High Country News. The 2022-launched column ended up being a finalist in 2024 for the National Magazine Award. She teaches at Colorado State University in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, having previously instructed at the University of Wyoming.

Cowboys and East Indians: Stories is a 2013 book by Nina McConigley. This book was the winner of the PEN Open Book Award and a High Plains Book Award, and was longlisted for the 2014 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. It was commissioned by the Denver Center for Performing Arts to become a play and premiered in 2026.

This is a collection of stories featuring characters who are Indian immigrants attempting to make their way in the rural American West. Those looking for an original book to read and those who enjoy the authors Maile Meloy or Jhumpa Lahiri may find this novel is exactly what they have been looking for in a story that is full of ‘such grace and understated power’ that people know that they are ‘in the presence of an incredible new voice in fiction’, according to Kevin Wilson.

Compassionate and at times funny, this story follows the journey of immigrants who go from India to Wyoming and then back once more, and introduces the reader to a variety of characters who don’t exactly fit the circumstances in which they are but are searching for belonging. They often achieve this through finding common ground with their neighbors or the open nature of the landscape of the West.

There are different people here, such as the woman who has recently come to Laramie who is asked by her husband’s cowboy co-worker to help him to cross-dress using her saris. There’s also a foreign exchange student who gives in to kleptomania. Meanwhile, a young Indian-American woman is dealing with her life in Casper with her white father after her Indian mother passes away.

There is also the American woman, who is making her way to Chennai to try and get some Accutane at discount for her chronic cystic acne. There is a good pace kept throughout, moving along from character to character with connection and empathy. The stories contend with the immigrant experience in a rural area and how communities can form where identity is built up by the place that they are in. Read Cowboys and East Indians in order to soak up every word and go along on the journey yourself!

How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder is a 2026 book by Nina McConigley. This is a fresh read and a debut novel that is a strong start from McConigley. Bold and inventive, this story starts off with a bang and doesn’t let up from there.

The story starts with the uncle dead and the tween niece confessing to the reader that she and her sister killed him and they blame the British for the deed. It’s summer in the year 1986. The Creel sisters are Georgie Ayyar and Agatha Krishna. They decide to welcome their aunt, uncle and young cousin who has just come from India into their rural Wyoming home, where they are going to live together.

They are doing this because this is the type of thing that families do. But that changes when the sisters end up deciding that it’s the right time for their uncle to die. If you asked Georgie, she would to tell you that the British are the ones to blame. But to understand more of why, one would first need to hear her story.

She goes into the violence that is being hidden in their history and their house, as well as the once strong bond that she shared with Agatha Krishna. Georgie also goes into her own understanding of who she is as an Indian-American in the West’s center. The result is a unique account that is a picture of a family, sisters, the eighties, and a murder mystery to be solved, and much, much more. Check out How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder to see how it ends!