Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid was born in the Antiguan capital of St. John’s while the country was still under colonial British rule. Despite the relative poverty in which Kincaid grew up, she received a high-quality education from the island’s colonial British schools and from her mother, who was a well-read and intelligent woman. When Kincaid was nine years old, her mother and step-father had three sons in quick succession. After this Kincaid felt increasingly isolated and neglected by her family, especially her mother. When she was 17, her parents withdrew her from school and sent her to the United States to work as a nanny with the intention that she would send her paychecks back to Antigua to support the family. Instead, Kincaid kept her own pay and began taking classes at a community college. Eventually, she found work in journalism, writing for teen magazines, New York City’s alternative paper The Village Voice, and Ms. magazine before landing at the New Yorker. As she began writing for publication, Kincaid adopted her pen name as a way to create a new, freer identity for herself. She married Allen Shawn, the son of the New Yorker’s chief editor, in 1979. The couple had two children before divorcing in 2002. Many of her novels, including Annie John (1985) and Lucy (1990) draw on events from Kincaid’s own life. Both her fiction and nonfiction frequently explore themes of colonialism and imperialism, gender and sexuality, class and power, mother-daughter relationships, and gardening. In 1992, she was appointed professor in the Department of African and African American Studies and the English Department at Harvard University. She lives—and grows a luxurious garden—in Vermont.