Nina McConigley, a creative writing professor at Colorado State University, has released a new novel rooted in immigration, family, and the experience of growing up biracial in the American West — continuing a literary career that has earned her national recognition and academic fellowships.
Why It Matters
McConigley’s work brings attention to the experiences of South Asian immigrant families in rural America, a perspective rarely represented in mainstream fiction. Her career spans award-winning short fiction, theatrical adaptation, and now a full-length novel that explores how displacement and identity shape families across generations.
Her themes intersect with broader national conversations around immigration’s cultural and civic dimensions in Colorado and beyond.
What Happened
McConigley’s new novel, How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder, is set primarily in rural Wyoming in 1986 and moves between that landscape and post-Independence India through flashbacks. The story follows two Indian families living together as an extended household in Wyoming, centering on characters Agatha Krishna and Georgie Ayyar, who carry out a murder that goes undiscovered.
The novel is written in an experimental blend of first and second person, a structural choice that separates it from conventional narrative fiction. McConigley grew up in Wyoming during the 1980s as a biracial child, and that lived experience shaped the novel’s setting and emotional texture.
Her previous book, the short story collection Cowboys and East Indians, won both the PEN Open Book Award and the High Plains Book Award. That collection was adapted for the stage by the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, with the world premiere taking place in January 2026.
By the Numbers
- 1986 — the year anchoring the novel’s primary timeline
- January 2026 — premiere date of the stage adaptation of Cowboys and East Indians at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts
- 2 major awards — PEN Open Book Award and High Plains Book Award for her debut collection
- 1 NEA fellowship — McConigley received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship
- 1 Harvard fellowship — she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
Zoom Out
McConigley’s fiction is part of a broader wave of literature examining South Asian diasporic life in non-urban America — a subject that has gained academic and cultural traction as immigration patterns have diversified beyond coastal cities. Her work challenges assumptions about where immigrant communities settle and how they maintain cultural identity across generations.
The stage adaptation of her debut collection signals growing institutional interest in translating immigrant narratives from the page to live performance, a trend visible in regional theater programming nationally. For Colorado audiences, the Denver Center production brought that work home to the state where McConigley now teaches and writes.
Immigration’s personal dimensions — documents, identity, belonging — remain sharply relevant. Immigrants navigating complex legal situations in Colorado face challenges that McConigley’s fiction, set decades earlier, continues to illuminate through character and place.
What’s Next
McConigley is already at work on her next project. She is developing a new novel set in the American West and is returning to playwriting with a new piece that touches on politics and fly fishing. The stage success of Cowboys and East Indians appears to have renewed her interest in theatrical work alongside her fiction.
She continues to teach creative writing at Colorado State University, where her work in both forms — fiction and drama — informs her engagement with students exploring their own narratives of place and identity.