The poet 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 a BA and MA from Radcliffe before it was subsumed by Harvard, was a Scholar in 1962-3 at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, and now lives with her husband of 59 years on an old farm in central New Hampshire.

      Here, their three children grown and gone, they have raised ten foals, a succession of dogs and cats, a few sheep, organic vegetables, and for several springs, tended a hundred sugar-maple taps. Both Kumins were avid horseback riders and competed in distance rides, carriage drives, and three-phase events.

     Kumin is the author of 15 books of poems, most recently Jack and Other New Poems, Bringing Together and The Long Marriage, preceded by Selected Poems 1960-1990, Connecting the Dots and Looking for Luck. In July of 1998, she suffered a near-fatal carriage-driving accident, recorded in her memoir, Inside the Halo and Beyond: Anatomy of a Recovery. She has also written three essay collections, including Always Beginning: Essays on a Life in Poetry, a collection of short stories, four novels and an animal rights murder mystery, Quit Monks or Die!

     In 1973, Kumin was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Up Country, her fourth book of poems. She has also received the Aiken Taylor Prize, the Poets' Prize for Looking for Luck, and the Ruth E. Lilly Poetry Prize as well as a grant from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a National Council on the Arts fellowship. She served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress before that post was renamed Poet Laureate of the United States, and as the poet laureate of New Hampshire from 1989 to 1994. From 1991 to 1994 Kumin was a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow. She has taught at many of the United States' most respected universities, including Princeton, Columbia, Brandeis, MIT, Washington at St. Louis and the University of Miami, served on the staff of the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Bread Loaf and Sewanee writer's conferences, and given readings or conducted writers' workshops in every state in the Union, save Hawaii and North Dakota. In 2005, Kumin was the recipient of the Harvard's Arts Medal.

     Together with fellow-poet 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.