Help building the largest human-edited directory of the web Suggest URL - Open Directory Project - Become an editor

directopedia.org uses links and structure from dmoz Open Directory Project.
The contents has been generating using technology developed by scientec.

Jamaica Kincaid (b. Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson, 25 May 1949 in St. John's, Antigua and Barbuda) is an Antiguan-American novelist. She 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 went on to study photography at the New York School for Social Research after leaving the family for which she worked, and also attended Franconia College in New Hampshire for a year.

Her first writing experience involved a series of articles for Ingenue magazine. In 1973, she changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid because her family disapproved of her writing. She came to New York at the age of seventeen to work for a New York family as an au pair. 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). 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 at Harvard University and currently lives in Vermont with her husband, Allen Shawn (the son of The New Yorker's longtime editor William Shawn) and their two children. She worked for The New Yorker as a staff writer until 1995.

"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."

Works

• "Girl," short story (June 26, 1978, appeared in The New Yorker)
• At the Bottom of the River (1983)
• Annie John (1985)
• A Small Place (1988)
• 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)
• Talk Stories (2000)
• My Garden (2001)
• Mr. Potter (2002)

External links

• Voices from the Gaps biography
• Literary Encyclopedia biography
• Salon Interview with Jamaica Kincaid (circa 1999?)

This article is based on the article "Jamaica Kincaid" from Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia created and edited by online user community. This article is distributed under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License. Here you find the list of authors of this article. The article can only edited within Wikipedia. Edit this article in Wikipedia.