Jamaica Kincaid (; born Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson on May 25, 1949) is an Antiguan–American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. Born in St. John's, the capital of Antigua and Barbuda, she lives in North Bennington, Vermont, and is Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence Emerita at Harvard University.
Kincaid was born on 25 May 1949 in St. John's, on Antigua. She grew up in relative poverty with her mother, Annie Richardson Drew, a literate, cultured woman and homemaker who also worked as an assistant to a local physician, and her stepfather, David Drew, a carpenter. She was very close to her mother until her three brothers were born in quick succession, starting when Kincaid was nine years old. After her brothers' births, she resented her mother, who thereafter focused primarily on the brothers' needs. Kincaid later recalled:
Our family money remained the same, but there were more people to feed and to clothe, and so everything got sort of shortened, not only material things but emotional things. The good emotional things, I got a short end of that. But then I got more of things I didn't have, like a certain kind of cruelty and neglect.
In an interview for The New York Times, Kincaid said, "The way I became a writer was that my mother wrote my life for me and told it to me."
Kincaid received a British education, as Antigua did not gain independence from the United Kingdom until 1981. Kincaid attended the Princess Margaret School and the Antiguan Girls School, and apprenticed as a seamstress. Although Kincaid was intelligent and frequently tested at the top of her class, her mother removed her from school at 16 to help support the family when her third brother was born, because her stepfather was ill and could no longer provide for the family. In 1966, when Kincaid was 16, her mother sent her to Scarsdale, an affluent suburb of New York City, to work as an au pair. After that, Kincaid refused to send money home; "she left no forwarding address and was cut off from her family until her return to Antigua 20 years later".
In 1979, Kincaid married the composer and Bennington College professor Allen Shawn, son of longtime The New Yorker editor William Shawn and brother of playwright Wallace Shawn. They have two children: a son, Harold, a music producer and songwriter; and a daughter, Annie, who works in marketing. Kincaid and Shawn divorced in 2002.
Kincaid is a keen gardener who has written extensively on the subject.
She converted to Judaism in 1993 for family reasons, and was president of Congregation Beth El, Bennington's synagogue, in the 1990s.
While working as an au pair, Kincaid enrolled in evening classes at a community college. After three years, she resigned from her job to attend Franconia College in New Hampshire on a full scholarship. She also attended the New School for Social Research, studying photography. She dropped out after a year and returned to New York, where she started writing for the teenage girls' magazine Ingénue, The Village Voice, and Ms. magazine. She got her first assignment at Ingenue by walking in off the street and proposing an interview with Gloria Steinem, which became "When I was Seventeen", her first published article. She changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid in 1973, when her writing was first published. Her friend and author Guy Trebay suggested the name from his "little satirical playlet". She first dismissed it as "too stupid", but adopted it a week later. She called the name change "a way for me to do things without being the same person who couldn't do them—the same person who had all these weights". She said that "Jamaica" is an English corruption of what Christopher Columbus called Xaymaca, the part of the world she comes from, and that "Kincaid" seemed to go well with "Jamaica". Her short fiction appeared in The Paris Review and in The New Yorker, where her 1990 novel Lucy was serialized.
Kincaid's work has been both praised and criticized for its subject matter because it largely draws upon her own life and because her tone is often perceived as angry. She has responded that many writers draw upon personal experience, and that to call her work autobiographical and angry is not valid criticism.
Kincaid was the 50th commencement speaker at Bard College at Simon's Rock in 2019.
As a result of her budding writing career and friendship with George W. S. Trow, who wrote many pieces for The New Yorker column "Talk of the Town", Kincaid became acquainted with New Yorker editor William Shawn, who was impressed with her writing. He employed her as a staff writer in 1976 and for nine years as a columnist for "Talk of the Town". Shawn's tutelage legitimized Kincaid as a writer and proved pivotal to her development of voice. She was a staff writer for The New Yorker for 20 years. She resigned in 1996, when then editor Tina Brown chose actress Roseanne Barr to guest-edit an issue. Though circulation rose under Brown, Kincaid was critical of Brown for making the magazine less literary and more celebrity-oriented.
Kincaid has said that when she was a writer for The New Yorker, she was often asked, particularly by women, how she obtained her position. She felt that these questions were posed because she was a young Black woman "from nowhere… I have no credentials. I have no money. I literally come from a poor place. I was a servant. I dropped out of college. The next thing you know I'm writing for The New Yorker, I have this sort of life, and it must seem annoying to people."
Talk Stories, a collection of "77 short pieces Kincaid wrote for The New Yorker's 'Talk of the Town' column between 1974 and 1983", was published in 2001.
Kincaid received the 2022 Paris Review Hadada Prize, the magazine's annual lifetime achievement award.
Her novels are loosely autobiographical, though Kincaid has warned against interpreting their autobiographical elements too literally: "Everything I say is true, and everything I say is not true. You couldn't admit any of it to a court of law. It would not be good evidence." Her work often prioritizes "impressions and feelings over plot development" and features conflict with both a strong maternal figure and colonial and neocolonial influences. Excerpts from her nonfiction book A Small Place were used as part of the narrative for Stephanie Black's 2001 documentary Life and Debt.
African-American literary critic, scholar, writer, and public intellectual Henry Louis Gates Jr. has said of Kincaid:
She never feels the necessity of claiming the existence of a black world or a female sensibility. She assumes them both. I think it's a distinct departure that she's making, and I think that more and more black American writers will assume their world the way that she does so that we can get beyond the large theme of racism and get to the deeper themes of how black people love and cry and live and die—which, after all, is what art is all about.