Constance Collier-Mercado

Constance Collier-Mercado is an experimental writer, artist, and womanist culture worker committed to Black language and collective memory. Born in Chicago and raised in the Bronx, her political home resides in the space between family connections tied to Atlanta, GA; Bolivar County, MS; and Beaufort County/Gastonia, AfroCarolina¹. Consumed by ideas of global Blackness as polyamorous Church, she weaves this aesthetic into her practice via an irreverent blk gender-infinite.

Winner of the 2023 Gulf Coast Prize in Critical Art Writing, she has received Fellowships from South Arts, Baldwin for the Arts, MacDowell, The Stay at Nearview, The Periplus Collective, The Watering Hole, Kimbilio, The Hambidge Center, and Jack Jones Literary Arts. Her writing has been published in the African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta (ADAMA) blog, Obsidian, Hennepin Review, Root Work Journal, The Believer, Kweli Journal, The Auburn Avenue, FIYAH Magazine, and via her substack, ‘On Repetition and Revision.’ Constance lives and works in Southwest Atlanta.

¹see: Michelle Lanier.

Artist Statement

I am an experimental writer/artist whose work examines nuance within dialectical, multilingual, and equivocal spaces. Consumed by ideas of global Blackness as polyamorous Church, I weave this aesthetic into my practice via an irreverent blk feminine divine. Born in Chicago and raised in the Bronx, my writing takes on a broad range of styles but is especially influenced by the poetry of the Black Arts Movement, cycles of repetition and revision, and a passion for the afrosurreal.

I'm interested in the contradictions of my existence in the wake of my grandparents' migration from the American South. My mother holds closer connection to South Carolina geechee culture from her native Beaufort County. Likewise, my father is only one generation removed from the Upper Delta waters of Bolivar County in northern Mississippi. I inherited merely the scraps of their flawed memory. I'm not always sure our family’s decision to settle North was the right one.

My fiction navigates these concerns by enacting a moody tension between improvisations descended from jazz, blues, and spiritual tradition compared with more grounded emphasis on plot, voice, and characterization. I find balance in the familiarity of Black life at its most vernacular.