Richard Holinger

Author, Poet, and Essayist

Richard Holinger’s award-winning short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction have appeared in The Southern Review, Chautauqua, Witness, Southern Indiana Review, The Iowa Review, and many other literary journals. A five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, his work has been selected for Best Microfiction 2025, and nominated for Best Small Fictions 2025 and Best of the Net 2024. His Thread piece earned a “Notable” mention in Best American Essays 2018.

Books include the forthcoming short fiction collection Unimaginable Things and Other Stories (Main Street Rag Publications); novelist John McNally has compared the work to Chekhov, Dybek, and Garcia Marquez.  His poetry chapbook Down from the Sycamores was described as “a variegated bouquet of lyric thought” by Guggenheim recipient poet Christina Pugh. Previous works include North of Crivitz, poetic work likened to Frost and Emerson by former Illinois poet Kevin Stein, and Not Everybody’s Nice and Hybrid Seeds: Little Fictions.

A Ph.D. graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Holinger has taught creative writing for over 40 years and led multiple writers’ groups in Illinois. He currently writes a column for Shaw Media and lives in rural northern Illinois.