Jamaica Kincaid

Writer Novelist Professor

Writer, novelist, and professor Jamaica Kincaid skillfully and elegantly tempers the boundary between poetry and prose. Through her books and novels including Annie John, Lucy, At the Bottom of the River and A Small Place, she has carved out a unique and cherished place in the American literary landscape.

Known for her candid and emotionally honest writing, Kincaid’s work attracted the attention of , where she became a staff writer and featured columnist for nine years. Her short stories also appeared in The Paris Review. Fans of Kincaid recognize her distinctive, melodic style with appeal across generations and ethnic boundaries. In 2014, she won the American Book Award, which celebrates multiculturalism and free expression.

Kincaid’s literary “voice” is deeply rooted in her experiences as a child in her native Antigua. Growing up under the colonial rule of England instilled in her a tragic, yet often-ignored perspective. Says Kincaid, “I never give up thinking about the way I came into the world, how my ancestors came from Africa to the West Indies as slaves. I just never forget it. It’s like a big wave that’s still pulsing.”

Her first book, At the Bottom of the River, won the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Her award-winning book, A Small Place, inspired the 2001 documentary, Life and Debt, about the impact globalization can have on a developing country. Her 2005 book, Among Flowers: A Walk In The Himalayas chronicles her adventure into the mountains of Nepal with a group of botanists. Kincaid’s new novel, See Now Then, was published on February 5, 2013.

The Josephine Olp Weeks Chair and Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College, Kincaid was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. Kincaid began her academic career in 1991 at holding joint appointments in the English and African-American Studies departments. She has won the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, Prix Femina Étranger, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the Clifton Fadiman Medal.

Her regal presence, so understated and quiet, yet so strong, enthralled our audience. She closed with a reading of Girl pitch-perfect, and during that time there was not a breath of literary air any place else in Florida. Quite fine and amazing Rollins College

Royce Carlton. Inc.866 United Nations Piaza New York NY 10017-1880 1.800. LECTURE 212.355.7700 fax 212.888.8659. email:[email protected] website: www.roycecarlton.com Jamaica Kincaid

Suggested Topics An Evening with Jamaica Kincaid: A Reading

The Garden as Metaphor & Paradox:A Source of Peace & Disturbance, Knowledge & Escape How is a place of respite and solace also a place of disturbance and longing? The garden is a landscape for refuge, yet the "snake was always in the garden," engendering enormous turmoil. In this lecture Ms. Kincaid will read from The Garden, 1999 and Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalayas, 2004. She will explore the symbolism and history of the Tree of Life (agriculture) and the Tree of Knowledge (horticulture). Making comparisons from The Garden of Eden, Ms. Kincaid will discuss how seeking pleasure and knowledge led to a fall from grace, contrasting the concepts of exploration and conquest.

Memoir: The Influence of Memory on Remembering

Coming of Age in A Small Place The author speaks of growing up female in a colonial society and how these two conditions, one natural, the other its opposite, formed her.

Royce Carlton. Inc.866 United Nations Piaza New York NY 10017-1880 1.800. LECTURE 212.355.7700 fax 212.888.8659. email:[email protected] website: www.roycecarlton.com Jamaica Kincaid

Books and Other Works See Now Then: A Novel Published 2013 In See Now Then, the brilliant and evocative new novel from Jamaica Kincaid—her first in ten years—a marriage is revealed in all its joys and agonies. This piercing examination of the manifold ways in which the passing of time operates on the human consciousness unfolds gracefully and Kincaid inhabits each of her characters, a Mother and Father, their two children living in a small village in New England, as they move, in their own minds, between the present, the past, and the future—for, as she writes, “the present will be a now then and the past is now then and the future will be a now then.” Her characters, constrained by the world, despair in their domestic situations. But their minds wander, trying to make linear sense of what is, in fact, nonlinear. See Now Then is Kincaid’s attempt to make clear what is unclear, and to make unclear what we assumed was clear: that is, the beginning, the middle, and the end. Lucy Published 2002 In this coming-of-age story Lucy, a teenage girl from the West Indies, comes to North America to work as an au pair for Lewis and Mariah and their four children. Lewis and Mariah are handsome, rich, and seemingly happy. Yet, almost at once, Lucy begins to notice cracks in their beautiful facade. In their review, The Wall Street Journal callled the book "Brilliant," and said "Lucy confirms Ms. Kincaid as a both a daughter of Bronte and Woolf and her own inimitable self." (Source: Farrar, Staus and Giroux)

A Small Place Published 2000 A brilliant look at and its effects in Antigua. Lyrical, sardonic, and forthright by turns, in a Swiftian mode, A Small Place cannot help but amplify our vision of one small place and all that it signifies. (Source: Farrar, Straus, Giroux)

Best African American Essays: 2009 Published 2009 This exciting collection introduces the first-ever annual anthology of writing solely by African Americans. Here are remarkable essays on a variety of subjects informed by—but not necessarily about—the experience of blackness as seen through the eyes of some of our finest writers. From art, entertainment, and science to technology, sexuality, and current events—including the battle for the Democratic nomination for the presidency—the essays in this inaugural anthology offer the compelling perspectives of a number of well-known, distinguished writers, including Malcolm Gladwell, Jamaica Kincaid, James McBride, and Walter Mosley, and a number of other writers who are just beginning to be heard. (Source: Amazon.com) Royce Carlton. Inc.866 United Nations Piaza New York NY 10017-1880 1.800. LECTURE 212.355.7700 fax 212.888.8659. email:[email protected] website: www.roycecarlton.com Jamaica Kincaid

Biography

Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson, in 1949 in St. John's, Antigua. As an only child, Kincaid maintained a close relationship with her mother until the age of nine, when the first of her three brothers were born. The growing size of the family not only brought about a "keener sense of their poverty" but also enhanced Kincaid's growing sense of isolation from her mother and her environment. Much of Kincaid's writing is intimately inspired by these tensions of her youth. The emotional onset of adolescence, as well as the rigid control of a British colonial education system heightened Kincaid's sense of isolation. Kincaid, while considered bright by her teachers, was also labeled as troublesome and sullen. It was at this time in her young life when Kincaid started her retreat into reading and stealing books. She says: When I was a child I liked to read. . . I didn't know anyone else who liked to read except my mother, and it got me in a lot of trouble because it made me into a thief and a liar. I stole books, and I stole money to buy them. . . Books brought me the greatest satisfaction. Just to be alone, reading, under the house with lizards and spiders running around·." (Kincaid in Garis, 42)

At the age of 17, with a growing ambivalence for her family and a rising contempt for the subservience of the Antiguans to British colonialist rule, Kincaid left Antigua, bound for New York and a job as an au pair. After working for three years and taking night classes at a community college, Kincaid won a full-scholarship to Franconia College in New Hampshire. However, after a year of feeling "too old to be a student," Kincaid dropped out of school, returned to New York, secured a job writing interviews for a teen-age girls' magazine, and changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid.

It was at this time that Kincaid's work in The Village Voice and Ingenue magazine drew the attention of the legendary editor of The New Yorker, . Kincaid reported in an interview with Dwight Garner that "it was William Shawn who showed me what my voice was. . . He made me feel that what I thought, my inner life, my thoughts as I organized them, were important. That they made literature" (salon.com). She became a staff writer for the magazine in 1976 and a featured columnist for the highly visible "Talk of the Town" section of the magazine for the next nine years. In 1978, Kincaid's first piece of fiction was published in The New Yorker, and it later became part of her first book, At the Bottom of the River (1983). This short story collection, composed of a series of lyrical vignettes or "prose poems," focuses on the growing consciousness of a young girl in the Caribbean (Contemporary African American Novelists, 261).

For its mesmerizing prose and gripping, dreamlike repetition, At the Bottom of the River was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Morton Darwen Zabel Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Two years later, in 1985, Kincaid published her first novel, Annie John, a story that many critics consider an expansion and refinement of the ideas originally presented in At the Bottom of the River. In Annie John, Kincaid once again draws upon the angst, isolation, and wonder of her own childhood in Antigua, to craft a touching narrative about the tenuous nature of mother-daughter relationships. The protagonist Annie John -- much like Kincaid in her youth -- is a willful, intelligent 10-year old who grows Royce Carlton. Inc.866 United Nations Piaza New York NY 10017-1880 1.800. LECTURE 212.355.7700 fax 212.888.8659. email:[email protected] website: www.roycecarlton.com Jamaica Kincaid

increasingly confused and cynical throughout her teenage years.

For her work on Annie John, Kincaid is the 2010 recipient of the Clifton Fadiman Medal and was selected as one of three finalists for the 1985 international Ritz Paris Hemingway. In addition, Kincaid is a recipient of the Anifield-Wolf Book Award and The Lila-Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund Award. She also received a nomination for the 1997 National Book Award for My Brother, a gripping chronicle of her relationship with her youngest brother, during his losing battle with AIDS. In 2004, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Perhaps the single most striking quality in Kincaid's writing is its honesty, or what called its "emotional truthfulness." , renowned West Indian poet, essayist, and playwright comments further on the multifaceted appeal of Kincaid's writing: "As she writes a sentence, the temperature of it psychologically is that it heads toward it own contradiction. It's as if the sentence is discovering itself, discovering how it feels. And that is astonishing, because it's one thing to be able to write a good declarative sentence; it's another thing to catch the temperature of the narrator, the narrator's feeling. And that's universal, and not provincial in any way" (In Garis, 80).

Kincaid's writing is compelling because it captures complex emotions and exposes divisive issues in a deceptively simple style. Her other major works include Annie, Gwen, Lilly, Pam and Tulip (1986), A Small Place (1988), Autobiography of My Mother (1996), My Brother (1997), Talk Stories (2000), My Garden (Book) (2001) and Mr. Potter (2002). Her latest book is Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya.

A professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College, where she teaches autobiography, literary imagination and fiction writing, Kincaid publsihed her latest book, See Now Then, in 2013. The novel is about a family in the small village of North Bennington, Vermont.

Royce Carlton. Inc.866 United Nations Piaza New York NY 10017-1880 1.800. LECTURE 212.355.7700 fax 212.888.8659. email:[email protected] website: www.roycecarlton.com