Maxine Combs (June 1937—February 18, 2002) is the author of three novels, The Inner Life of Objects (2000), Handbook of the Strange (1996) and The Foam of Perilous Seas (1990), and two poetry books: Listening for Wings (2002), and Swimming out of the Collective Unconscious (1999). She moved to Washington, DC in the early 1970s and taught English at several universities, including American University (1970-1964), George Mason University (1979-1988), Howard University (1988-1989) and the University of the District of Columbia (various years from 1972 to 1990). Combs won the Larry Neal Award for Fiction (1998) and the Slough Fiction Award (1990), and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the DC Commission on the Arts, and a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She was a fiction editor for The Antietam Review.