New Mexico State University poet Connie Voisine recognized

New Mexico State University poet Connie Voisine is one of seven to receive the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.

Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s office announced the award on Monday, August 25.

Lujan Grisham called the seven “influential art trailblazers,” and said that together, “they create a tapestry that reflects the full beauty and complexity of who we are as New Mexicans.”

Voisine told the Bulletin that this feels extra special.

“You really do train yourself as an artist to say, ‘it’s okay, I don’t need that,’” she said of winning the award. “But this all adds up to something, especially in this current climate where art is deemed unimportant. That New Mexico is holding onto that value feels especially meaningful.”

Voisine is one of the most accomplished poets in southern New Mexico. She has won a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fulbright Scholarship, which she spent in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She has taught poetry writing at NMSU in the creative writing program for 24 years. She has published four books of poetry, one chapbook of poetry and has a fifth book of translated poems is under consideration.

Voisine is bilingual. Having grown up in the northern tip of Maine, she spoke French before she spoke English.

Her work

Voisine said every book “is a different idea for me,” but her poetry tends to be in a narrative form.

She said a new book of poetry she began during the COVID-19 pandemic started from watching women detective shows. She said she began writing poems as if she were the woman detective. She wasn’t sure, at first, why it interested her.

But the more she worked on the poems, the more themes of women navigating violence in a patriarchal world and what justice means began to emerge.

The book she translated from French to English is a book of poems written by Togo poet Patron Henekou. Henekou won a Fulbright Scholarship to spend a year in the U.S. and his odes to New Mexico “melted my heart,” Voisine said.

Voisine’s childhood

If there’s one superpower Voisine has, it’s reading really fast.

“Once I learned to read, I read all my books at the public library on Saturdays,” she said.

Voisine grew up in northern Maine, a bilingual child whose humble home included a father who worked as a lumberjack.

But despite her early life on the east coast, Voisine said the west called to her. She has spent most of her career teaching in the creative writing program at NMSU.

The local poet with a national reputation said that what drew her to poetry, as opposed to writing fiction, is that she prefers to explore a moment or a gesture.

She says she does that even when reading a novel. She’s more interested in a character’s gesture within the novel that in, say, the plotline.

“I think a need for interiority is what drove me to reading. What I love is the interiority,” she said.

Even while Voisine has many accomplishments, she comes from humble beginnings.

“I grew up in a very rural, very humble subsistence farming family,” she said.

Voisine said her best learning experiences came from reading poetry and fiction as a child. She said that she comes from a family of “great storytellers.”

“Even though we know all the stories,” she said laughing.