Writer, novelist and professor Jamaica Kincaid skillfully and elegantly tempers the boundary between poetry and prose. With 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.
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.”
Kincaid won the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts for her first book, At the Bottom of the River. Her award-winning book, A Small Place, inspired the 2001 documentary, Life and Debt, about the impact globalization can have on a developing country. Kincaid is at work on a new novel, See Now Then.
A visiting professor at Harvard University, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004.
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