Jamaica Kincaid

Antiguan-American · born 1949

Born Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson on May 25, 1949, in St. John's, Antigua, to Annie Richardson, a homemaker and physician's assistant, and raised largely by her mother's husband, the carpenter David Drew, since her biological father, a taxi driver named Potter, played no part in her upbringing, Kincaid grew up on an island still under British rule. She read voraciously as a girl, once being made to copy out the opening books of Milton's Paradise Lost by hand as a school punishment, and as a teenager had her whole hidden library of borrowed books burned in the yard by her mother, who had caught her reading instead of minding a baby brother. Pulled from school at sixteen when her third brother was born and her stepfather fell ill, she was sent that same year, 1966, to Scarsdale, New York, to work as an au pair, and cut off contact with her family for two decades. She studied briefly at Franconia College and the New School, wrote for Ingénue and the Village Voice, and in 1973 renamed herself Jamaica Kincaid so she could write without her family knowing. The New Yorker's William Shawn hired her as a staff writer in 1976, and for the next twenty years she wrote the magazine's Talk of the Town column and its fiction, including the 1978 story Girl. Her first book, At the Bottom of the River, appeared in 1983; her autobiographical first novel, Annie John, in 1985; and A Small Place, an essay on tourism and colonialism in Antigua, in 1988. Lucy (1990), The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), My Brother (1997, written after the death of her brother Devon from AIDS), Mr. Potter (2002), and See Now Then (2013) followed, alongside celebrated writing on gardening. She married the composer Allen Shawn in 1979, had two children, and divorced in 2002. She is Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence Emerita at Harvard University and lives in North Bennington, Vermont.