Christopher H. Conn is a memoirist, essayist, and institutional architect based in Greenwood Village, Colorado. His work examines the systems that decide on our behalf — the calm rooms where consent is assumed, transferred, or erased before we are old enough to name it.
Born in Sikeston, Missouri into a family whose legacy was built on civic presence, commercial success, and carefully maintained silence, Conn attended Brentwood Academy in Nashville, Tennessee and Auburn University. In Nashville, he worked radio promotions at Word Records before a trajectory through addiction and counterfeiting led to federal incarceration.
After release and recovery, Conn built Fidelity Behavioral Health — a closed-continuum program in Colorado serving justice-involved and unhoused individuals struggling with co-occurring substance use and mental health disorders. The program was studied by a SAMHSA workgroup as a model for integrated care. He spent a decade in behavioral healthcare consulting, compliance, M&A, and grant writing before turning to the work that had been waiting underneath all of it.
His debut memoir, Consent Without Language, traces that full arc across four acts and thirty-two chapters: from a childhood organized around silence through Nashville, federal prison, the architecture of recovery, and the reclamation of consent on terms that do not require anyone else's permission. The book is complete at approximately 74,000 words and is currently seeking agent representation.
Conn's intellectual framework — the Five Theses — examines power not as force but as architecture: institutional belonging as grooming, usefulness as currency, silence as the condition of entry, and the counterfeiter as the most honest product of a system built on counterfeiting. His essays and criticism extend this framework into literary analysis, institutional critique, and the somatic record of childhood silence.
He lives in Greenwood Village, Colorado with his fiancé David and their German Shorthaired Pointer, Alpine.