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Jamaica Kincaid’s experiences growing up in Antigua under the pressures of poverty, colonialism, and an ambivalent mother inspire and inform the movement of her evocative, edgy, and sometimes controversial prose. Issues of race, gender, colonialism, adolescent angst, loss, and tenuous mother-daughter relationships suffuse Kincaid's fiction and non-fiction writing.
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. 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 from Elaine Potter Richardson to Jamaica Kincaid.
Kincaid's writing captures complex emotions and exposes divisive issues in a deceptively simple style. Her major works include Lucy (1990), The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), and My Garden (Book) (1999). Kincaid lives in Bennington, Vermont with her husband, Allen Shawn, a composer and son of the former editor of the New Yorker, and their two children. She teaches creative writing at Bennington College and Harvard University.
