February 15, 2001

Jamaica Kincaid To Read From Her Work
Appearance Is Part of Ramapo College Series

(Mahwah) -- Award-winning author Jamaica Kincaid, known for her New Yorker stories and such books as A Small Place and the National Book Award-nominated My Brother, will read from her work Tuesday, April 3 at 7:30 p.m. in the Sharp Theater at Ramapo College of New Jersey. Admission is free. Kincaid’s appearance is part of the Contemporary American Writers Series sponsored by the School of American and International Studies at Ramapo College.

Kinkaid’s first book, At the Bottom of the River, 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 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."

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. Of her own literary origins, she 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." Her third book, A Small Place, published in 1989, is an extended essay about the shameful legacy of Antigua’s colonial past written in language that rises 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."

Kincaid’s most recent work, My Garden (1999), is described as "an intimate, playful, and penetrating book on gardens, the plants that fill them, and the gardners who tend them." Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and The Paris Review. She 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 Sharp Theater is located in the Angelica and Russ Berrie Center for Performing and Visual Arts.