Arts-Entertainment
Elk River Arts & Lectures (ERAL) presents an evening with Nina McConigley, author of the 2013 short story collection, Cowboys and East Indians, and her newly released novel, How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder. The event takes place on Thursday, April 16th at 7pm, at Elk River Books located at 122 S 2nd Street in Livingston with doors opening at 6:30 pm.
McConigley was born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming. Cowboys and East Indians was the winner of the 2014 PEN Open Book Award and a High Plains Book Award. Her play based on the collection was commissioned by the Denver Center for Performing Arts and is premiering worldwide in 2026.
Author Celeste Ng writes of McConigley’s latest, “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 2019-2020 Walter Jackson Bate fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a 2022 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, McConigley teaches at Colorado State University.
This event is part of ERAL’s longstanding Lecture Series; writers from all over the country visit Park County to share their work with our community. ERAL is a nonprofit dedicated to cultivating and celebrating the literary arts in Park County; the Lecture Series is made possible by the AMB West and community donations. For more information, call (406) 529-1682 or visit elkriverarts.org.