Maxine Kumin

Maxine Kumin was born in Germantown, Philadephia, in 1925, into a nominally observant Reform Jewish family that lived next door to the Convent of the Sisters of St. Joseph, a teaching order. Here she attended the first few years of primary school, which, she says, accounts for the juxtaposition of Jesus and Jewish rituals in many of her poems. She attained bachelor's and master's degrees from Radcliffe College before it was subsumed by Harvard, and was a Scholar from 1962-1963 at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study.

Kumin is the author of 16 collections of poetry, as well as novels, short stories, essays, memoirs, and more than twenty children's books. She served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1981-1982, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her 1972 collection Up Country: Poems of New England. Other collections of poetry include Jack and Other New Poems; Looking for Luck, which received the Poets' Prize; and her most recent, Still to Mow. She is also the author of Inside the Halo and Beyond: Anatomy of a Recovery, a memoir about a nearly fatal carriage-driving accident, and Always Beginning: Essays on a Life in Poetry. Kumin's work has earned her a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award, the Harvard Arts Medal, the Robert Frost Medal, and the Paterson Prize for Distinguished Literary Achievement. She has taught at universities including Princeton, Columbia, Brandeis, MIT, Washington at St. Louis, and the University of Miami, has served on the faculty of the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Bread Loaf, and Sewanee writers' conferences, and given readings or conducted writers' workshops in every state in the Union, except for Hawaii and North Dakota. Together with Carolyn Kizer, she first served on and then resigned from the board of chancellors of the Academy of American Poets, an act that galvanized the movement for opening this august body to broader representation by women and minorities.

She and her husband, married 62 years, live on a farm in Warner, New Hampshire, where she served as the state's Poet Laureate from 1989-1994.

Online Resources:

Profile in The Christian Science Monitor
NYT: "Poets Leaving Academy to Protest Absence of Minorities"
Atlantic magazine review of The Long Marriage, with audio
CSM slideshow and reading
Poetry Foundation profile

Selected Bibliography:

Still to Mow (W. W. Norton & Company 2007)

Jack and Other New Poems (W. W. Norton & Company 2006)

The Long Marriage (W. W. Norton & Company 2003)

Inside the Halo and Beyond: Anatomy of a Recovery ( 2001)

Always Beginning: Essays on a Life in Poetry (Copper Canyon Press 2000)

Selected Poems 1960-1990 (W. W. Norton & Company 1998)

Connecting the Dots (W.W. Norton & Company 1998)

Looking for Luck ( 1992)

Bringing Together: Uncollected Early Poems 1958-1988 ( 1988)

Up Country: Poems of New England ( 1972)