An Evening with Nina McConigley and Vauhini Vara

Date and Time

• Thursday, Feb 5, 2026  6pm - 7pm

Location

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Details

Old Firehouse is delighted to be joining Nina McConigley and Vauhini Vara to celebrate the release of How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder! We will be offering copies of this book at the Center for Creativity on Februrary 5th from 6:00-7:00PM where you can hear Nina and Vauhini talk about this book before getting your copy personalized. Books will be available to order in store or online, but we unfortunately cannot ship internationally. We can't wait to see you there!

About How To Commit a Postcolonial Murder:

Summer, 1986. The Creel sisters, Georgie Ayyar and Agatha Krishna, welcome their aunt, uncle and young cousin--newly arrived from India--into their house in rural Wyoming where they'll all live together. Because this is what families do. That is, until the sisters decide that it's time for their uncle to die.

According to Georgie, the British are to blame. And to understand why, you need to hear her story. She details the violence hiding in their house and history, her once-unshakeable bond with Agatha Krishna, and her understanding of herself as an Indian-American in the heart of the West. Her account is, at every turn, cheeky, unflinching, and infectiously inflected with the trappings of teendom, including the magazine quizzes that help her make sense of her life. At its heart, the tale she weaves is:
a) a vivid portrait of an extended family
b) a moving story of sisterhood
c) a playful ode to the 80s
d) a murder mystery (of sorts)
e) an unexpected and unwaveringly powerful meditation on history and language, trauma and healing, and the meaning of independence

Or maybe it's really:

f) all of the above.

About Nina McConigley:

Nina McConigley was born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming. She is the author of the short-story collection Cowboys and East Indians and How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder. Her story collection was the winner of the 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, she 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. The Denver Center for Performing Arts commissioned her play based on Cowboys and East Indians, which premieres in January 2026. She teaches at Colorado State University.

About Vauhini Vara:

Vauhini Vara is the author of Searches, named a best book of the year by Esquire, Slate, and Publisher’s Weekly. Her previous books are This is Salvaged, which was longlisted for the Story Prize and won the High Plains Book Award, and The Immortal King Rao, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the Colorado Book Award. She is also a journalist and a 2025 Omidyar Network Reporter in Residence, currently working as a contributing writer for Businessweek.

This event is produced by an outside organization and is unaffiliated with the Downtown Development Authority. The DDA website serves as a marketing outlet for events and promotions occurring inside the Downtown boundary. For questions regarding the event, please contact the event producer.