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Writer, Poet, and Photographer who craves words, and people who love words, Constance Camille hangs her hat somewhere in Florida with her two Volpino Italiana dogos where she writes creative nonfiction, poetry, and fiction. Her idea of heaven is a picnic and a good book.

A graduate of the University of Central Florida with an MFA in Creative Writing and a BFA in English, Constance is the book review editor to UCF’s online literary journal Aquifer, where she previously served as an assistant editor. She mostly recently completed her poetry chapbook Falling Naked into Fallow Land. Her work has been published in The Helix, Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, Bright Flash Literary Fiction, The Write Stuff Anthology, and  Aquifer: The Florida Review online. Her poem “Daydream in a Bookstore About Men in This Life,” co-written with Judith Roney, was a finalist in Sundog Lit’s 2019 Collaborative Contest. She also served as editor for the online digital magazine South Georgia Today where she wrote a weekly column “A Bird’s Eye View.”

A Word From Constance

Most of my creative non-fiction work centers around my mother who died five years ago at the age of eighty-six. The complexity of her personality serves as an inspiration in my writing. As most writers do, I choose to write out my grief and my mother finds her way into much of my prose. Although my mother’s death journey was not unique, it was uniquely hers. And her journey, as well as my walk beside her, is a story I long to tell. I am drawn to the struggles of aging and the stories the greatest generation tells us.

My work in progress, Taking Inventory, is a micro-memoir/biography centered on the complex relationship between me and my mother. The book is an excavation of the woman my mother really was versus the image of her I created in my mind. “At some point, you realize that your mother is not who you thought she was and you realize that she is something separate from what you made her out to be.”

My fiction novel The Colour of Redd is largely drawn from . . . guess who? Even in make-believe, my mother manages to waltz in and take center stage–such is a character that is worth writing about. I am a southern writer at heart. My fiction work leans heavily on the characters and folklore in and around rural South Georgia. Drawing from observations in my own social environment, I bring authenticity to my work that is needed to write about the southern working class.