The Kelly Writers House Fellows Program
Jamaica Kincaid

March 19-20, 2007

Using life to inspire fiction, Jamaica Kincaid often explores the complexity of mother-daughter relationships, the effects and aftereffects of colonialism, and alienation more generally. Kincaid has recently edited The Best American Travel Writing of 2005, published Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalayas (2004) and Mr. Potter (2003) and is currently a Visiting Lecturer at Harvard University. Other works include The Autobiography of My Mother (1995), Lucy (1990) and Annie John (1985). She won the Prix Femina Etranger for her novel My Brother in 2000, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989, a PEN/Faulkner Award nomination and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts for her first collection of short stories, At the Bottom of the River (1983). Kincaid was a New Yorker staff writer from 1976 until 1995 and has been publishing fiction and nonfiction since the mid-1970s. In addition to The New Yorker, her work has appeared in Ingenue magazine and The Village Voice. In 2004 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In the New York Review of Books, Darryl Pinckney has written, "Kincaid's rhythms and the circularity of her thought patterns in language bring Gertrude Stein to mind. She is an eccentric and altogether impressive descendant."