Tagged: Inspired Lives

Maxine Kumin’s career has spanned over half a century. She's the recipient of  awards such as the Pulitzer Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award. Kumin was the poetry consultant for the Library of Congress in 1981-1982, and has taught at many of the country’s most prestigious universities, including MIT, Princeton, and Columbia. Despite traveling away from home to lecture at schools and universities around the United States, Kumin has retained close ties with her farmhouse in rural New Hampshire.

Victor Kumin, Harvard graduate with a degree in Chemistry, helped create the Atomic Bomb under direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer. He lives in Warner, New Hampshire with his wife, the former U.S. Poet Laureate, Maxine Kumin. The two exchanged 575 letters back and forth during their courtship. These letters will be the subject of an article, written by Maxine, in the September 2012 issue of the American Scholar.

Michael Heaney, former platoon leader, returned to the spot where 46 years ago 10 of his men under his command were killed in an ambush by North Vietnamese soldiers. He returned to the land he calls "my valley of death" to reclaim a piece of his soul. He was the only member of his unit to survive an ambush by North Vietnamese soldiers in May 1966.

Heaney spent a great deal of time coming to realization that he had survived Operation Crazy Horse, the combat operation so fierce it is discussed in history books.

Dana Dakin is the founder of WomenTrust Inc., a community-based microlending program in the village of Pokuase outside of Ghana’s capital city in West Africa. Dakin launched WomensTrust to help stimulate entrepreneurship and economic development. She fostered relationships with women clients to address the root cause of poverty in the area. The company started a scholarship program to keep girls in school. Dakin also sought to improve the maternal mortality rate in the region by integrating volunteer nurses into healthcare clinics.