Constance Collier-Mercado is an experimental writer and artist whose work examines nuance within dialectical, multilingual, and equivocal spaces. Consumed by ideas of global Blackness as polyamorous Church, she weaves this aesthetic into her practice via an irreverent blk feminine divine.
Born in Chicago and raised in the Bronx, her writing takes on a broad range of styles but is especially influenced by the formally and politically innovative poetry of the Black Arts Movement, cycles of repetition and revision, and the inheritance of a womanist thought practice she calls “the Black fantastic-ecstatic-surreal.”
Shortlisted for the 2020 Samuel R. Delany Fellowship, she has also received fellowships from The Watering Hole, Kimbilio [Fiction], The Hambidge Center, The STAY at Nearview, and in 2019 she was the Jack Jones Literary Arts Octavia Butler Fellow.
Her words and art have been published in FIYAH Magazine, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, The Auburn Avenue, Kweli Journal, The Believer, Root Work Journal, Hennepin Review, Obsidian, and the Black Freighter Press Anthology When We Exhale.
While in residence at MacDowell, she worked on her novel-in-progress about a mentally ill Black woman who believes she's being called to a Hero's Journey. She was also inspired during her stay to make a number of protest artworks about the ongoing fight to stop construction on a police training facility in her city.
