Associate Professor of English • New Mexico State University

Connie Voisine is an associate professor of English at New Mexico State University, where she directs the creative writing program. She earned a BA in American studies from Yale University, then moved to New York City where she studied writing at the New School and the Writers Studio. She subsequently proceeded to complete an MFA from University of California at Irvine, and a Ph.D. from University of Utah. During this time, she worked at a variety of jobs--bartender, development researcher at the Brooklyn Museum, as well as facilitating poetry study and summer travel to Europe and Central America. Besides attending as many poetry readings as she could, she developed into an avid dance and music performance attendee, became interested in the visual arts, often going to five or six events a week. Her immersion in the avant-garde art world of the 1980s allowed her to understand the benefits of a vibrant art community and the role of an artist within one.

Her first book, Cathedral of the North, won the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Award Series in Poetry and was released by University of Pittsburgh Press. Her second book, Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream, was published by University of Chicago Press in 2008 and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award.

Deploying a kind of lyric narrative, Voisine's poems frequently feature speakers as they encounter contemporary culture in a variety of locations--including the American Southwest and Mexico. Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream was also influenced by medieval literature and the poetry of Marie de France.

A colleague and friend, Brian Byrd had this to say in 2009 about Connie Voisine and her work, when her book, Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream, was shortlisted for the LA Times Book Award:

"She's a wonderful colleague and citizen in our world of letters in piece of the desert along the border. She's full of curiosity about language and poetry and diverse poetics. Her poetry, of course, is remarkable. But for me as a poet her friendship has been invaluable. She's always there to listen to my distracted riffs of whatever oddball idea I have about poetics. She lets me wander. When I was putting together White Panties, Dead Friends & Other Bits and Pieces of Love I was unsure of a number of the poems. I hadn't yet read them many of them aloud [sic] to an audience. I asked her to look at the manuscript. Instead, she invited me to join her on Friday afternoons when she and two other poets--Sheila Black and Carmen Geminez-Rosello Smith--got together and shared and critically discussed their work. It was a great time for me. I'm not a workshopper, I've didn't do Creative Writing School, so I was a bit nervous. Especially the old man poet among three women poets. But they, especially Connie, welcomed me and helped greatly to improve the book. I wouldn't have had that experience without Connie's presence, so I thank her and wish her good luck on Friday night. That's when the winners are announced with lots of pomp and ceremony. My fingers are crossed. Good luck, Connie."

Connie Voisine lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where she lives in an old adobe house with her husband, the writer Rus Bradburd, and their daughter, Alma.