Connie Kinsey is a former military brat who has put down deep roots in a converted barn on a dirt road at the top of a hill in West Virginia. She lives with two dogs and a cat, and is pursuing happiness, one cup of coffee at a time.

Primarily a memoirist, the events of her life permeate her work. Her fiction is sometimes described as autofiction because it incorporates autobiography in a fictionalized form with endings far from the truth of what really happened.

Marybelle, the memoir of her 4^th-grade year during the Vietnam War won the West Virginia Writer’s Annual Contest in 2015. It is published at Longridge Review https://longridgereview.com/connie-kinsey/. 

Her short story, Second-Hand Smoke, also won the West Virginia Writer’s Annual Contest and was published by As You Were: The Military Review Vol 17 on Veteran’s Day, November 2022. You can read it here.

The long short story, Something Blue, was published by The Write Launch in March of 2020. It’s available at https://thewritelaunch.com/2020/02/something-blue/. 

Stench, a short story, is published by Cold Mountain Review on their website (Spring-Summer 2020) and will be available in their print journal in the spring of 2021.  You can find it at https://www.coldmountainreview.org/issues/spring-summer-2020/stench-by-connie-kinsey. 

Connie’s digital essay about her beloved barn, My West Virginia Home, was self-published in 2020, and is available on YouTube at  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3hck2Lv8_g 

She has also been selected three times for the Women of Appalachia Project Women Speak (2016-17, 2019-20, and 2021-22). She was twice honored for her spoken word prose and once for her spoken word short story. 

In January of 2021, Connie was thrilled to be selected as one of two Writers-in-Residence for the Museum of the American Military Family & Learning Center. The museum published a book in July of 2022, E. Pluribus Unum: GRAICE Under Pressure in press. It features 11 of Connie’s essays.

The May 2022 issue of Hippocampus Magazine includes her essay, The Black Panther Needs to Sprawl, in the Writing Life column. You may read it here.

Since May of 2021, she writes for WestVirginiaVille, a digital magazine, where she also serves as Minister of Paragraphs.

In June of 2022, Connie led three workshops at the West Virginia Writers Annual Summer Conference. They were: Provoked to Write: the Power of the Prompt; Literary Citizenship and Feats of Derring-Do; and Read, Write, Speak: the Benefits of Open Mics and Spoken Word. She loved the experience.

She was thrilled the Paris Review rejected her submission but asked to see more of her work. She may have the rejection carved on her tombstone.

Connie studied anthropology, philosophy, and creative writing at Marshall University. She tells folks she has a degree in trivia.  She achieved her degree after a misspent youth and considers her tenure as a middle-aged student as some of the best years of her life. 

She was interviewed about her thoughts on writing and creativity by The Sidetracked Sisters in July 2022. You can hear the podcast here.

Connie has one child, a son, who is an executive chef.  She says she taught him everything he knows.  It’s not true, but she likes to say it.  Her son and daughter-in-law presented her with her first grandchild in 2022– a son, Julien. Genetically programmed to be a grandmother, she has waited for years and was beginning to despair! He is the love of her life.

She works full-time with a children’s nonprofit. 

Currently, she is working on her full-length memoir about growing up as a Marine Corps brat during the Vietnam War. She is also writing her first novel with a working title of Black Fishnets and Combat Boots. She hopes the novel is intentionally funny, but is finding writing dark comedy with a social message damnably hard.

She blogs now and again at http://wvfurandroot.com and is wild about comments.  You can reach her easily on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ConnieKinseyWriter or by email at c_kinsey@frontier.com. She is also active on Twitter as TRConnnie and Instagram as Hillbilly Diva. So far she has not been sucked into Linked In.