Maxine Kumin was born in Philadelphia. She was educated at Radcliffe College, where she received an A.B. in 1946 and an M.A. in 1948. She married Victor M. Kumin in 1946, and they have three children. An instructor and lecturer at Tufts University from...

Today is Wednesday, Feb. 7, the 38th day of 2007. There are 327 days left in the year.Today's Highlight in History:On Feb. 7, 1812, author Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England.On this date:In 1861, the general council of the Choctaw Indian nation adopted a...

In the following essay, George examines how Kumin confronts the loss of friends and family and her own mortality in her later poetry.

In the following interview, Kumin discusses her poetry. She declares that "in the process of writing, as you marshal your arguments, as you marshal your metaphors really, as you pound and hammer the poem into shape and into form, the order—the marvelous informing order emerges from it, and it's—I suppose, in a sense, it's in the nature of a religious experience."

In the following interview with Showalter and Smith, Kumin and poet Anne Sexton discuss their twenty-year-old friendship and its influence on their poetry.