Judith Kitchen attended college in Vermont. After graduating, she worked as a part-time secretary, an assistant in a carnival supply business, with the New York state Poets in the Schools, and finally as an instructor at SUNY College at Brockport. For twenty years, she served as editor and publisher of the State Street Press Chapbook Series. She wrote several books during her lifetime including Perennials, Writing the World: Understanding William Stafford, Only the Dance, Distance and Direction, Half in Shade: Family, Photography, and Fate, and The Circus Train. The House on Eccles Road won the S. Mariella Gable Prize in fiction. Her work has also won the Lillian Fairchild Award, the… Anhinga Prize for poetry, and two Pushcart Prizes. She was the co-director of the Rainier Writing Workshop with her husband, Stan Sanvel Rubin. She died of cancer in November 2014 at the age of 73.