Colleen Newquist is a writer and higher-education consultant following a career as an award-winning journalist and longtime communications leader at the University of Chicago. Her manuscript, FOREVER 69, received the 2025 Hugh Holton Award from Mystery Writers of America Midwest. Her short story “Pranzo” received the Graham School Fiction Prize and was published in Dark Comedy Hour Review. She is also the creator of the long-running zine Stop and Smell the Butter: A Journal of Appreciative Living, an Utne Independent Press Award finalist.
Colleen is a member of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America. When she’s not writing, she can be found in Three Oaks, Michigan, digging up dirt in the library’s newspaper archives.