Maxine Kumin won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1973 and has published twelve books of poetry, five novels, and four collections of essays, most recently Always Beginning: Essays on a Life in Poetry (Copper Canyon Press, 2000) and Inside the Halo and Beyond: The Anatomy of a Recovery (W. W. Norton, 2000). Her latest book of poetry, The Long Marriage, will be published by W. W. Norton in November 2001. Kumin and her husband live on a farm in New Hampshire. (updated 2001)