Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid was born and educated in St. John's, Antigua, in the West Indies, and she now lives with her husband and children in Vermont. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and The Paris Review.

Ms. Kincaid's first book, At The Bottom Of The River, which Plume reissued in January 1992, was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and went on to win the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Her second book, Annie John, published by Plume in 1986, is the story of a young girl's coming of age in the West Indies. Susan

Kerney, writing in The New York Times Book Review, thought Annie John's story so "touching and familiar it could be happening in Anchorage, so inevitable it could be happening to any of us, any time, any place. And that's exactly the book's strength, its wisdom, its truth."

Of her own literary origins, Ms. Kincaid has said, "It would seem a bit odd for someone like me, coming from the place I come from, not to be interested in what you call richness of description." (New York Times, April 7, 1985). Her third book, A Small Place, published by Plume in 1989, is an extended essay about the shameful legacy of Antigua's colonial past written in language that soars above anger and her outrage. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times, in a review of A Small Place, declared, "Ms. Kincaid writes with passion and conviction, and she also writes with a musical sense of language, a poet's understanding of how politics and history, private and public events, overlap and blur."

Lucy was praised by the Wall Street Journal as "Brilliant...Lucy confirms Jamaica Kincaid as both a daughter of Charlotte Bronte and Virginia Woolf and her own inimitable self," and USA Today said, "Its emotional power is stunning...The lyric simplicity with which she tells this story makes its enormously moving." Plume is proud to have published the trade paperback edition of Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy in 1991.

Ms. Kincaid was a 1992 recipient of the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund's annual writer's award and the 1997 Anisfield Wolf Book Award, which was established 60 years ago to recognize books that illuminate the rich diversity of human cultures. The Autobiography of My Mother was published in January 1996 to widespread acclaim and My Brother, (Farrar Strauss, Fall 1997) was nominated for the National Book Award. An anthology, My Favorite Plants, was published by Farrar Strauss in the Fall, 1998.

Ms. Kincaid’s most recent work, My Garden (Farrar, Strauss), a departure from ealier books, was published in 1999.