Maxine Kumin

Maxine Kumin was born in Philadelphia on June 6, 1925. She received her BA and MA from Radcliffe College.

Kumin has published numerous books of poetry, including And Short the Season: Poems (W. W. Norton, 2014); Where I Live: New & Selected Poems 1990–2010 (W. W. Norton, 2010); Still to Mow (W. W. Norton, 2009); Jack and Other Poems (W. W. Norton, 2003); The Long Marriage (W. W. Norton, 2003); Bringing Together: Uncollected Early Poems 1958–1989 (2003); Connecting the Dots (W. W. Norton, 1996); Looking for Luck (W. W. Norton, 1992), which received the Poets’ Prize; Nurture (Viking, 1989); The Long Approach (Viking, 1985); Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief (Viking, 1982); House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate (Viking, 1975); and Up Country: Poems of New England (Harper & Row, 1972), for which she received the Pulitzer Prize.

Kumin is also the author of a memoir, Inside the Halo and Beyond: The Anatomy of a Recovery (W. W. Norton, 2000), four novels, a collection of short stories, more than twenty children’s books, and five books of essays, including The Roots of Things: Essays (Northwestern University Press, 2009) and Always Beginning: Essays on a Life in Poetry (Copper Canyon Press, 2000).

Kumin has received the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Sarah Josepha Hale Award, the Levinson Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, and the National Council on the Arts.

Kumin has served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (now, U.S. poet laureate) and poet laureate of New Hampshire. She is also a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She died in Warner, New Hampshire, on February 6, 2014.