Maxine Kumin was born Maxine Winokur in Philadelphia on June 6, 1925, and has spent most Maxine Kumin of her life in New England. She earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Radcliffe College, during which time she met and married Victor Kumin, a Harvard graduate. The couple settled in suburban Boston, but Kumin did not begin publishing poetry until nearly ten years after that. In 1957, she enrolled in a poetry workshop where she met another suburban Boston housewife—and another soon-tobe major poet—Anne Sexton. Kumin and Sexton began a friendship, which included writing children's books together, that lasted until seventeen years later when Sexton, long troubled by depression and psychosis, committed suicide.

In the late 1950s, Kumin began a teaching career, and, to date, she has been a professor, visiting lecturer, senior fellow, and poet-in-residence at more than fifteen colleges and universities across the country. Once she...