Published October 28, 2019
Nina McConigley, an assistant professor in the University of Wyoming Honors College, will give the fall Faculty Senate Speaker Series talk Tuesday, Nov. 5.
McConigley, an award-winning writer whose work at UW focuses on global perspectives and diversity, will discuss “New Territories: Migration and Exile” at 4:10 p.m. in Room 138 of the Berry Biodiversity Conservation Center. Her talk is open and free to the public.
McConigley’s lecture will focus on the literature of migration and exile. From the book of Exodus to Ovid’s “Poetry of Exile,” writers have long examined what it means to leave one’s country, to migrate to the unknown, she says. McConigley will examine how these migrations shape characters into new territories and internal spaces.
“Any journey that has a geographical and social repositioning asks us to reconsider ourselves, to examine not only the self, but the other,” she adds.
McConigley, who also has taught creative writing at UW for a decade, is the Walter Jackson Bate Fellow in Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Born in Singapore to Irish and Indian parents, McConigley grew up in Casper. She holds a master’s degree in English from UW; a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of Houston; and a bachelor’s degree in literature from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn.
In 2009, a short story she wrote, titled “Curating Your Life,” originally published in the fall 2009 issue of American Short Fiction, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, which honors the best new literature of the year. The story went on to be featured in her collection of short stories, “Cowboys and East Indians” (2013), winner of the International PEN Open Book Award and the High Plains Book Award for Best Short Stories, which also was named one of Oprah Winfrey’s O magazine’s Best Prize-Winning Books in 2014.
Her work also has appeared in the New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction and the Asian American Literary Review.
McConigley was a fellow with the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences, and has served on the faculty of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. An in-demand speaker and reader, she has been the featured author at international, national and regional conferences, and frequently lectures across UW.
For more information, call the Faculty Senate office at (307) 766-5347 or email facultys@uwyo.edu.