Jamaica Kincaid
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Jamaica Kincaid (b. Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson, 25 May 1949 in St. John's, Antigua and Barbuda) is an American novelist, gardener, and gardening writer. She lives with her family at North Bennington in the U.S. state of Vermont.
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[edit] Early life
Kincaid lived with her stepfather, a carpenter, and her mother until 1965. In Antigua, she completed her secondary education under the British system, due to Antigua's status as a British colony until 1967.
She moved to New York at the age of 16 to work for a family as an au pair. She worked as a fact checker at Forbes magazine where she became close friends with Marsha Daniel of Raleigh, North Carolina who was working at Forbes as a reporter and her husband, the author, magazine publisher, and professor Myles Ludwig, who was then the editorial director of Art Direction magazine and later the creative director at Penthouse and Viva magazines, and Peter Ainsley who was the music critic for Women's Wear Daily and later worked as a writer for Time magazine. They spent a great deal of time together. Ludwig, Daniel, Richardson and Ainslie spent many weekends in the early 70s with Christopher Tree. Tree was a California hippie who played a variety of musical instruments in a performance act called Spontaneous Sound. Tree was living in a small house in New Paltz, New York with his then girlfriend on a non-working farm owned by an advertising executive. After Richardson had returned to university, she wrote to Ludwig asking for a job and he hired her to work at Art Direction. She went on to study photography at the New School for Social Research. She attended Franconia College in New Hampshire for a year and later worked at the New Yorker magazine.
[edit] Writing career
In 1973, she changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid because her family disapproved of her writing.
Her first writing experience involved a series of articles for Ingenue magazine.
She worked for The New Yorker as a staff writer until 1995.
Her novel Lucy (1990) is an imaginative account of her experience of coming into adulthood in a foreign country, and continues the narrative of her personal history begun in the novel Annie John (1985). Other novels, such as The Autobiography of My Mother (1996) explore issues of colonialism and much of the anger associated with it. This text is a unique departure for Kincaid because of the way it crosses genres.
She has also published a collection of short stories, At the Bottom of the River (1983), a collection of essays, A Small Place and more.
She is a visiting professor and teaches creative writing at Harvard University. She received an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from Wesleyan University during its 176th Commencement Exercises in 2008.
"I'm someone who writes to save her life," Kincaid says, "I mean, I can't imagine what I would do if I didn't write. I would be dead or I would be in jail because -- what else could I do? I can't really do anything but write. All the things that were available to someone in my position involved being a subject person. And I'm very bad at being a subject person."
[edit] Family
She has two children, a boy, Harold, and a girl, Annie, with her ex-husband, the composer Allen Shawn (the son of The New Yorker's longtime editor William Shawn).
[edit] Works
- "Girl," short story (June 26, 1978, appeared in The New Yorker then again in 1984 in At the Bottom of the River By Jamaica Kincaid)
- At the Bottom of the River (1984)
- Annie John (1985)
- A Small Place (1988)
- Annie, Gwen, Lilly, Pam, and Tulip (1989)
- Lucy (1990)
- Biography of a Dress (1990)
- "On Seeing England for the First Time," essay (1991, appeared in Harper's Magazine)
- The Autobiography of My Mother (1995)
- My Brother (1997)
- My Favorite Plant: Writers and Gardeners on the Plants they Love (editor; 1998)
- My Garden (1999)
- Talk Stories (2001)
- My Garden (2001)
- Mr. Potter (2002)
- Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalayas (2005)
- Figures in the Distance
- Life and Debt Film (2001)
