Camille Baker Books in Order

Camille Baker was born in Chicago and grew up mostly in San Antonio, Texas. Storytelling started early for her. When she was eight, she was already making up stories, illustrating them, acting them out with toys, and typing them on her grandmother's computer. That habit stuck long before writing looked like a real career path.

College took her to The Ohio State University, where she earned a bachelor's degree in finance. The funny part is that some of the clues to her future were hiding in plain sight. She took sign language classes for fun, and when business lectures dragged, she wrote stories instead. Numbers may have been the official major, but story and language kept tugging at her.

After graduation, she changed course.

Baker completed the Interpreter Training Program at San Antonio College and built a working life as an interpreter. In interviews, she has talked about feeling out of step with the neat post-college path some of her peers seemed to have mapped out. That in-between feeling shows up in her fiction too. Her characters are often figuring things out in real time, with work, love, grief, and family all arriving at once.

Her debut novel, Have We Met?, arrived in 2021. The idea began with a conversation with her best friend about whether someone from your past could have been the person you were meant to be with. Later, after her own short-lived experience with dating apps, she turned that question into a story with a magical twist, an app that claims it can point you toward your soul mate. The book follows Corinne as she deals with loss, career uncertainty, missed connections, and the possibility of new love.

Chicago matters here.

Baker has said that Have We Met? was shaped by her move back to Chicago in 2019, her search for new local friends, and the feeling the city gives her. She did the kind of research that sounds both practical and a little funny, asking relatives about neighborhoods, driving around to check locations, and making sure scenes worked in the real world. The city in her books does real work. It is not just background.

In 2022 she returned to the same world with The Moment We Met, a standalone companion novel centered on Tiwanda Harris. This time the focus widens to family history, entrepreneurship, and the pull between ambition and romance. Tiwanda inherits her late mother's journal, gets a chance to build a business, and finds herself dealing with the Met app too. Baker has said Tiwanda first caught her attention as a side character, and that curiosity eventually turned into a full novel.

Across both books, Baker writes about people in transition. Her stories care about romance, but they also care about friendship, family tension, career questions, and the small signs that can make life feel a little less random. She has been clear that she wants her fiction to reflect the world she lives in, which helps explain the range of identities and relationships in her casts.

She now lives in South Chicago, where she continues to interpret and write. The line from childhood storyteller to working novelist feels pretty easy to follow. She pays attention to people, she likes a big emotional question, and she keeps finding ways to turn everyday uncertainty into warm, searching fiction.