Nina McConigley is the author of the story collection Cowboys and East Indians, which was the winner of the 2014 PEN Open Book Award and winner of a High Plains Book Award. It also was on the longlist for the 2014 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

She was born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming by an Irish father and Indian mother.

She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston, where she was an Inprint Brown Foundation Fellow. She also holds an MA in English from the University of Wyoming and a BA in Literature from Saint Olaf College. She is the winner of a Barthelme Memorial Fellowship in Non-Fiction and served as the Non-Fiction Editor of Gulf Coast: a Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. Her play, Owen Wister Considered was one of five plays produced in 2005 for the Edward Albee New Playwrights Festival, in which Pulitzer-prize winning playwright Lanford Wilson was the producer.

She has been awarded a work-study scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2005-2009, and received a full fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center. She was granted a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in Fiction at the 2010 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. In 2011, she was a Scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and in 2014 was a Fiction fellow.

Nina McConigley has a tattoo of a covered wagon on her back and a stuffed Jackalope mounted on her wall. The mythological Western creature isn’t real – it is just a jackrabbit with antlers glued on – but McConigley’s love for Wyoming is.