Nina McConigley was born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming. She earned her MA from the University of Wyoming, and her MFA at the University of Houston. Her short-story collection Cowboys and East Indians was the winner of the 2014 PEN Open Book Award and a High Plains Book Award. 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, was the Walter Jackson Bate fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and is a 2022 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Creative Writing Fellowship. Her play based on Cowboys and East Indians was commissioned by the Denver Center for Performing Arts and she has an essay collection about the American West forthcoming in 2025 from the University of Georgia Press. Her novel, How to Commit A Postcolonial Murder, will be published by Pantheon Books in early 2026.