Literary Connection

Lori Chapman Longfritz

Lori Chapman Longfritz is co-author of the New York Times Best Seller, Alone at Dawn: Medal of Honor Recipient John Chapman and the Untold Story of the World’s Deadliest Special Operations Force, theprime source about her brother John’s Air Force career field, Combat Control, and the actions that eventually earned him the Medal of Honor. She has also self-published First There: The Life and Legacy of American Hero MSgt John Chapman, a biographical memoir about growing up with the boy who will go down in military history as one of the greatest and selfless warriors of modern times. He is a legend in the Special Tactics community and beyond.

Amazon MGM is making Alone at Dawn into a major motion picture of the same name, the release of which is set for the fall of 2027. Ron Howard is directing the film and Adam Driver portrays Chapman. In addition, Anne Hathaway plays an intelligence officer, a compilation character of the men and women who were tasked with proving that Chapman’s actions earned him the Medal of Honor.

Lori grew up in blue collar New England in a time when people knew their neighbors and embraced the closeness that community offered. She now enjoys her life in the “forever west” town of Cheyenne, Wyoming, and lives with her husband, Kenny, their son, John, and furry girl, Maya.

Nina McConigley

Nina McConigley is the author of the story collection Cowboys and East Indians, which was the winner of the PEN Open Book Award and winner of a High Plains Book Award. It also was on the long list for the 2014 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. She was born in Singapore and grew up in Wyoming. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston, where she was an Inprint Brown Foundation Fellow. She also holds an MA in English from the University of Wyoming and a BA in Literature from Saint Olaf College. She is the winner of a Barthelme Memorial Fellowship in Non-Fiction and served as the Non-Fiction Editor of Gulf Coast: a Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. Her play, Owen Wister Considered was one of five plays produced in 2005 for the Edward Albee New Playwrights Festival, in which Pulitzer-prize winning playwright Lanford Wilson was the producer. She has been awarded a work-study scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2005-2009 and received a full fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center. She was granted a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in Fiction at the 2010 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. In 2011, she was a Scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and in 2014 was a Fiction fellow.

Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, O, The Oprah Magazine, Ploughshares, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Salon, American Short Fiction, Memorious, Slice Magazine, Asian American Literary Review, and Puerto del Sol, among others.

She was a 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. She served on the board of the Wyoming Arts Council from 2014-2022. In 2019-2020, she was the Water Jackson Bate Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. In 2022, she received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

Her play, based on her short story collection, Cowboys and East Indians, was commissioned by the Denver Center for Performing Arts and will be produced and have its world premiere in 2026.

She teaches at Colorado State University and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

Her novel, How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder will be published by Pantheon in January 2026. And her essay collection on the American West will be published by the University of Georgia in 2027.