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

four Pushcart Prize nominations. His short fiction will appear in Best Microfiction 2025 and

nominated for Best Microfiction 2025, Best Small Fictions 2025, and Best of the Net 2024. His

essay in Thread earned a “Notable” designation from Best American Essays 2018.

Books include a forthcoming collection of short fictions, Unimaginable Things and Other

Stories, published by the Mint Hill Books imprint of Main Street Rag Publications, some stories

appearing in Witness, Vestal Review, Southern Indiana Review, Midway Journal, and more.

A chapbook, Down from the Sycamores: Poems, is available for pre-sale until April 25,

2025, with a release date of June 20; poems have been previously published in Boulevard, The

Texas Review, Rhino, and elsewhere. Poet and UIC professor Christina Pugh writes, “Down from

the Sycamores is a variegated bouquet of lyric thought, sound, and sight, which will move as

well as enliven the reader.”

Of the essays published first by Shaw Media, Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences:

The Views of a Guy Who Wants To Know, “What Are Pinewood Derby Cars Made Out Of?”,

David Hamilton, Editor Emeritus of The Iowa Review, writes, “[Holinger is] obviously a very

alert writer, uses language well, has all sorts of inventive phrasing.”

About North of Crivitz, Holinger’s first book of poetry, former Illinois Poet Laureate

Kevin Stein wrote, “Within these lines one hears Emerson and Frost wrestling in verdant

woods.” Carol Frost, English Chair at Rollins college and author of ten books of poetry, writes,

“In fine poems…Richard Holinger gives us a map to the interior and the way home.” Christina

Pugh, 2019 Juniper Prize for Poetry winner, says Holinger “invites the reader into a geography

and a life both proudly regional and powerfully resonant…like Frost before him.”

Not Everybody's Nice, winner of the 2012 Split Oak Press Flash Prose Contest judged by

B.J. Hollars, was described by C. Michael Curtis, former Fiction Editor of The Atlantic Monthly,

as “brief tales compress[ing] the boundaries of storytelling, but their very economy and

Holinger’s shrewd glimpses of the human landscape make diverting and surprisingly satisfying

reading.” Novelist Lore Segal called the stories, “beautiful.”

Another chapbook, Hybrid Seeds: Little Fictions, a collection of innovative flash fictions,

contained work originally published in Beloit Fiction Journal, Monkeybicycle, Western

Humanities Review and elsewhere.

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, The Grounding of Flyover

States: Flights of a Midwestern Essayist, 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.