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Luck and Life in Pronghorn Country

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“Witty and ultimately profound…McConigley blends the macabre material with clever stylistic devices…This thrilling bildungsroman is perfect for fans of Celeste Ng.”

— Publishers Weekly starred review for How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder

“I have been waiting for Nina McConigley’s debut novel for years and it’s even better than I could have imagined. How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder takes all the expected stories about growing up Indian American, slices them open with razor-sharp wit, and turns them inside out. A moving portrayal of sisterhood and a much-needed examination of how power is abused—over girls, over countries, over cultures—and the possibilities, and costs, of reclaiming that power.”

— Celeste Ng

“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.”

— PEN Open Book Award Judges Citation

“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.”

— Luis Alberto Urrea

“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.”

— Los Angeles Review of Books

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.

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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