Kumin, Maxine Winokur

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 creative writing at U.S. universities and currently teaches poetry in New England College's Low-Residency M.F.A. Program. Kumin's awards include the Pulitzer Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and six honorary degrees. Since 1976, she and her husband of 63 years have lived in Warner, New Hampshire, where she writes, farms, and raises horses.

Kumin is a versatile writer. She has published fiction, works for children, essays, and a memoir, but is best known for her award-winning poetry. Kumin's poetry has been variously described as transcendentalist, pastoral, and memorial. Her work probes three overarching themes—human relationships, loss, and rural life in New England—and is marked by a strong private voice, clear vision, and lack of sentimentality. At the core of her oeuvre, she admits, is a preoccupation with the profound experience of parenting one son and two daughters: “my poems have been inextricably enmeshed in my role as mother.”

Kumin writes with compassion and determination, an unusual combination, which results in a highly individualized voice. In the unadorned language of Family Reunion, for example, Kumin articulates the passing of time and the perceptions of an aging parent who is visited by an adult child: “Wearing our gestures, how wise you grow,/ballooning to overfill our space,/the almost-parents of your parents now./So briefly having you back to measure us/is harder than having let you go.” In poems of motherhood, written over the course of a career that spans five decades, Kumin is always unflinching in her gaze and affection.