Richard Holinger’s fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and book reviews have appeared in The Southern Review, Boulevard, Cimarron Review, Hobart, North American Review, The Iowa Review, Western Humanities Review, Witness, Chicago Quarterly Review, Chautauqua, and elsewhere. He is a seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee and two-time Best of the Net nominee. In 2026, Holinger had two fictions nominated, one accepted, for Best Microfiction 2025, and one fiction nominated for Best Small Fictions.
Books include a collection of newspaper columns, Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences, about which David Hamilton, Editor Emeritus of The Iowa Review, writes, “[Holinger] uses language well, has all sorts of inventive phrasing.” About North of Crivitz, poetry of the upper Midwest, former Illinois Poet Laureate Kevin Stein notes, “Within these lines one hears Emerson and Frost wrestling in verdant woods.” Not Everybody’s Nice, winner of the 2012 Split Oak Press Flash Prose Contest, C. Michael Curtis, former Fiction Editor of The Atlantic Monthly, describes as “tales compress[ing] the boundaries of storytelling, but their very economy and Holinger’s shrewd glimpses of the human landscape make…surprisingly satisfying reading.”
Holinger’s collection of short fiction, Unimaginable Things and Other Stories, includes work first published in ACM, Constellations, Gone Lawn, The Iowa Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Southern Indiana Review, Sundog, Witness, and others.
Manure Dreams and Other Essays won the 2025 Choeofpleirn Press Nonfiction Award, its release in March, 2026, essays appearing in Chautauqua, Hobart, Chicago Quarterly Review, Cutleaf, JMWW, and elsewhere.
Degrees include a Ph.D. in English (Creative Writing) from The University of Illinois at Chicago, and a master’s degree in English from Washington University, St. Louis.
He has taught English and creative writing on the university, community college, and secondary school levels. He has two grown children and lives with his wife, Tia, in rural northern Illinois.