Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid (born May 25, 1949, St. John’s, Antigua) is a Caribbean American writer whose essays, stories, and novels are lyrical, evocative portrayals of family relationships and her native Antigua. Other notable themes in her work include feminism, postcolonialism, and gardening.

Childhood and influences

Born Elaine Potter Richardson, she was raised by her mother and stepfather. Her mother, Annie Richardson Drew, encouraged her reading and presented her with a copy of the concise edition of The Oxford English Dictionary when she was seven years old. A formative experience occurred during her childhood when Richardson was made to copy out the first two books of John Milton’s Paradise Lost by hand as punishment for misbehaving in class. As she recounted to The New York Times in 2025, the process stirred her sense of creative interpretation and kindled her intellect. Her other early literary influences include the King James Version of the Bible and Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel Jane Eyre.

Emigration to the United States and writing for The New Yorker

Richardson settled in New York City when she left Antigua at age 16. She first worked as an au pair in Scarsdale, New York, and then in Manhattan. She later won a photography scholarship in New Hampshire but returned to New York within two years. In 1973 she took the name Jamaica Kincaid (partly because she wished the anonymity for her writing and to distance herself from her family), and the following year she began regularly submitting articles to The New Yorker magazine, where she became a staff writer in 1976. In 2025 Kincaid told The New York Times, “I was the only Black woman there, which I didn’t notice. When I was there, I wasn’t thinking about my own race so much. I was thinking about, ‘How can I write?’ I was so obsessed with writing.”

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Kincaid’s writings for the magazine often chronicled Caribbean culture. Her essays and stories were subsequently published in other magazines as well.

Literary works

In 1978 Kincaid published “Girl” in The New Yorker, a story that became her literary breakthrough. In one long sentence, it details a mother’s domestic and social instructions to her daughter. In 1983 Kincaid’s first book, At the Bottom of the River, a collection of short stories and reflections, was published. Setting a pattern for her later work, it mixes lyricism and anger. Annie John (1984) and Lucy (1990) are novels but autobiographical in nature, as are most of Kincaid’s subsequent works, with an emphasis on mother-daughter relationships. A Small Place (1988), a three-part essay, continues her depiction of Antigua and her rage at its despoliation.

Kincaid’s use of anger in her work has drawn some criticism. But in 2013 she told The American Reader, “People only say I’m angry because I’m Black and I’m a woman. But all sorts of people write with strong feeling, the way I do.”

Kincaid’s treatment of the themes of family relationships, personhood, and the taint of colonialism reached a fierce pitch in The Autobiography of My Mother (1996) and My Brother (1997), an account of the death from AIDS of Kincaid’s younger brother Devon Drew.

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In 2001 her “Talk of the Town” columns for The New Yorker were collected in Talk Stories, and in 2005 she published Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya, an account of a plant-collecting trip she took in the foothills of the Himalayas. The novel See Now Then (2013) chronicles the late-life dissolution of a marriage by way of the jilted wife’s acerbic ruminations. It won a 2014 American Book Award.

Kincaid collaborated in 2024 with artist Kara Walker on the children’s book An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children. In 2025 Kincaid’s essays and cultural criticism from The New Yorker, Village Voice, Ms., and other publications were collected in Putting Myself Together: Writing 1974– .

Personal life and honors

Kincaid married the composer Allen Shawn (son of The New Yorker editor William Shawn) in 1979. They had two children and divorced in 2002. Kincaid was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.