11/10/14: I was so excited to talk with newly minted PEN Open Book Award Winner Nina McConigley author of Cowboys and East Indians. I first met Nina at a writer’s conference when she was still working on the book, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to see all of her success with this excellent read! Get your copy now Listen to our chat here or download it from itunes!-Heidi Durrow
NINA McCONIGLEY is the author of the story collection Cowboys and East Indians, which was the winner of the 2014 PEN Open Book Award. She was born in Singapore and grew up in Wyoming. 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 will be a fellow in Fiction.
She has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for The Best New American Voices. Her story “Curating Your Life” was a notable story in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010 edited by Dave Eggers. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Salon, American Short Fiction, Memorious, Slice Magazine, Asian American Literary Review, Puerto del Sol, and Forklift, Ohio.
She was the 2010 recipient of the Wyoming Arts Council’s Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Writing Award and was a finalist for the 2011 Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award. She currently serves on the board of the Wyoming Arts Council. Cowboys and East Indians is a finalist for the 2014 High Plains Book Award, and on the longlist for the 2014 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. She is at work on a novel and teaches at the University of Wyoming.
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