Maxine Kumin was born in 1925 into a Reform Jewish family and raised in Germantown, Philadelphia, where she attended Catholic elementary school. She earned a B.A. and M.A. from Radcliffe College. In 1957, she studied poetry with John Holmes at the Boston Center for Adult Education.

There she met poet Anne Sexton, with whom she shared a close friendship until Sexton's suicide in 1974. From 1962 to 1963, Kumin was scholar of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study (now the Bunting Institute). Kumin was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (now Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry) from 1981 to 1982, poet laureate of New Hampshire from 1989 to 1994, and was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1995.

She has taught ...