Richard Holinger

Richard Holinger’s fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, book reviews, and scholarly articles have appeared in The Southern Review, Chautauqua, Witness, Southern Indiana Review, The Iowa Review, The Ohio Review, Southern Indiana Review, Boulevard, and have garnered five Pushcart Prize nominations. His short fiction will appear in Best Microfiction 2025 and was nominated for Best Small Fictions 2025, and Best of the Net 2024. His essay in Thread earned a “Notable” designation from Best American Essays 2018.

Holinger’s graduate education includes a M.A. in English from Washington University (St. Louis) and a Ph.D. from University of Illinois at Chicago. His teaching experience ranges from a fellowship at UIC where he taught Comp and Fiction; to serving as adjunct instructor at several far west suburban Chicago community colleges (Comp and Creative Writing); to four decades of teaching in parochial college prep high schools, including forty years at Marmion Academy, Aurora, Illinois. 

For over twenty years after founding it, he facilitated the St. Charles Writers Group, sponsored by the St. Charles (IL) Library, and is founder and facilitator of Night Writers Workshop, sponsored by the Geneva Public Library. Since 2000, Holinger has written newspaper columns for Shaw Media, presently writing columns for the Kane County Chronicle.  

New projects include a collection of creative nonfiction, Wet and Dry in the Driftless: Midwestern Essays, many pieces originally appearing in Chautauqua, Catamaran, Chicago Quarterly Review, Cimarron Review, Hobart, South Dakota Review, and others.

Holinger lives in rural northern Illinois an hour and a half west of Chicago where he and his wife overlook a field where turkeys, woodchucks, deer, fox, blue herons, bald eagles, and other wildlife occasionally pass by. They have two grown children, one an assistant professor of Creativity, the other a landscape architect who started his own business.