University of Wyoming Department of English Lecturer Nina McConigley’s collection of short stories, “Cowboys and East Indians,” is among the finalists for a PEN Open Book Award.

Formerly the Beyond Margins Awards, the Open Book Award offers a $5,000 prize to an author of color for book-length writings committed to racial and ethnic diversity within the literary and publishing communities. Works of fiction, literary nonfiction, biography/memoir, poetry and other works of literary character are strongly preferred.

Published by FiveChapters Books and set in Wyoming, “Cowboys and East Indians” explores the immigrant experience and the collisions of cultures in the American West.

International PEN, the worldwide association of writers, was founded in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual cooperation among writers everywhere; to emphasize literature’s role in developing mutual understanding and world culture; to fight for freedom of expression; and to act as a powerful voice on behalf of writers harassed, imprisoned and, sometimes, killed for their views.

McConigley has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the “Best American New Voices,” and her play, “Owen Wister Considered,” was produced in 2005 for the Edward Albee New Playwrights Festival. 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.

Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction and the Asian American Literary Review, among others.

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