Constance Collier-Mercado

is an experimental writer, artist, and Black culture worker living in Atlanta. Born in Chicago and raised in the Bronx, her work examines the nuanced layers found within Black dialectical, multilingual, and equivocal spaces - those literal and imagined intersections between sensory, mystic, and social identity - to include cultures of abuse, empowerment, and dis/ABILITY.

Consumed by notions of global Blackness as polyamorous Church, she weaves this aesthetic into her practice in the form of an irreverent Black feminine divine.

Recently named the Jack Jones

Octavia Butler Fellow in Fiction, she is also an alumnus of the Hurston/Wright Foundation Writer's Week, the VQR Poetry Writer's Conference, and the Homeschool Claremont Poetry Conference.

Her words and visual art have been published in FIYAH Literary Magazine, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, The Auburn Avenue, Kweli Journal, The Believer, and elsewhere.

An excerpt from her grief play,

Chelsea's Dream: Embracing Yellow, premiered as a unanimous selection at the 2015 Atlanta Black Theater Festival and she produced a one-woman spoken word homage to The Last Poets at the 2016 Festival. Her mixed-media work has been exhibited at the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library's central branch, among other spaces.

Constance has further curated two AfroFutures Syllabus events:

Hoo-Doula/Voo-Doula,

which was hosted at the

Auburn Avenue Research Library,

and Black Sun/Black Son

as a live Twitter chat meant to coincide with the 2017 North American Solar Eclipse.

Hoo-Doula/Voo-Doula has since become a monthly AfroFutures book club at The Movement Lab in Southwest Atlanta.

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Constance is currently writing a first book of poetry and a novel which depicts the divinity and kinetic energy of The Kinfolk. In her free time, she can be found obsessing over the fact that she has no free time.