Darryl Pinckney in The Paris Review:
Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson on Antigua in 1949. When she was sixteen, her family interrupted her education, sending her to work as a nanny in New York. In time, she put herself on another path. She went from the New School in Manhattan to Franconia College in New Hampshire, and worked at Magnum Photos and at the teen magazine Ingenue. In the mid-’70s, she began to write for The Village Voice, but it was at The New Yorker, where she became a regular columnist for the Talk of the Town section, that everything changed for her. Her early fiction, much of which also appeared in that magazine, was collected in At the Bottom of the River (1983), a book that, like her Talk stories, announced her themes, her style, the uncanny purity of her prose. She has published the novels Annie John (1985), Lucy (1990), The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), Mr. Potter (2002), and See Now Then (2013). A children’s book, Annie, Gwen, Lilly, Pam and Tulip, came out in 1986. Aside from the collected Talk Stories (2001), her nonfiction works include A Small Place (1988), a reckoning with the colonial legacy on Antigua; My Brother (1997), a memoir of the tragedy of AIDS in her family; and two books on gardening, My Garden (Book) (1999) and Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya (2005).
Kincaid divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is a professor of African American studies at Harvard University, and Bennington, Vermont, where her large brown clapboard house with yellow window trim is shielded by trees. She has two children from her marriage to the composer Allen Shawn, the son of the former New Yorker editor William Shawn, and in the living room she displays on a table—proudly, apologetically—productions from the arts-and-crafts camps and classes that her son and daughter attended over the years.
More here.
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