[New-Poetry] a plea

[cvoisine at nmsu.edu]

please ignore if you are:

not in contact with young writers who are interested in mfa programs
not interested in mfa programs
are curmudgeonly (to save yourself some time).

thanks,

connie voisine



dear friends, literary workers and professors

this is a plea for your undergraduates. somewhat literally.

here goes (and i hope this isn't a misuse of this listserve): this past
application season, the poetry mfa at new mexico state university had a
very good applicant pool but one that was not very deep. meaning: not that
many people applied, but the ones who did were excellent). our pool
suffered usual attrition (people went onto great programs like Iowa and
University of Michigan, etc) and unusual attrition (two women got pregnant
and decided to postpone graduate school for a while). the end result was
that we had two (out of five) graduate assistantships with no one to fill
them and relinquished the ga’s to other programs. needless to say, that
seemed like a tragedy! i want to encourage you to have your promising
undergraduates check out our program, ask me any questions they might
have, and hopefully apply. funding is so hard to come by in mfa programs
and good writers should be able to get a grad degree without incurring
debt. that’s why i felt compelled to get the work out by writing you all.

ours is a three year program and students are funded all three years with
the ga—a generous one, $15,000 a year, healthcare, teaching only one class
per semester—and the third year is given mostly to thesis work and an
intensive thesis workshop. las cruces is an inexpensive place to live and
has an especially vibrant literary community. students in our mfa program
benefit from much formal and informal contact with their professors and
their equally accomplished and dedicated peers. it’s the kind of program
that i would have loved. we have an active reading series where we bring
10-12 poets and fiction writers a year. this year, for example, we’ll
readings by poets Tony Hoagland, Susan Briante, Sarah Vap, Ana Castillo, A
Van Jordan, etc. Each poet also delivers a craft lecture/workshop with the
grad students. with our third, thesis-focused year, students graduate with
strong, competitive manuscripts. Furthermore, while at nmsu, they can work
on our literary magazine, Puerto del Sol, which is about to undergo a
renovation. They can get paid to teach poetry in the schools, work on the
reading series, and learn other perhaps marketable skills through an
internship program with Noemi Press, Denise Chavez’ Border Book Festival
and the poetry translation press, Zephyr Press.

our faculty is young and committed. i have been here 6 years (young more
in the poetry sense) and, since K West has retired, we have recently hired
Wompo Carmen Smith. Carmen not only brings to our graduates students her
interest in the avant garde but also her book arts experience, and her
chapbook series. Our visiting writer, whom we hope to be able to continue
to hire, is poet Sheila Black. i can supply bios and cvs to anyone who
would like to take a second look. also, we have an outstanding fiction
faculty with whom students are encouraged to study.

thanks for reading and please don’t hesitate to ask for more information.

Connie Voisine