Kincaid divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is a professor of African American studies at Harvard University, and Bennington, Vermont, where her large brown clapboard house with yellow window trim is shielded by trees. Aside from the collected Talk Stories (2001), her nonfiction works include A Small Place (1988), a reckoning with the colonial legacy on Antigua My Brother (1997), a memoir of the tragedy of AIDS in her family and two books on gardening, My Garden (Book) (1999) and Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya (2005). A children’s book, Annie, Gwen, Lilly, Pam and Tulip, came out in 1986.

She has published the novels Annie John (1985), Lucy (1990), The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), Mr. Her early fiction, much of which also appeared in that magazine, was collected in At the Bottom of the River (1983), a book that, like her Talk stories, announced her themes, her style, the uncanny purity of her prose. In the mid-’70s, she began to write for The Village Voice, but it was at The New Yorker, where she became a regular columnist for the Talk of the Town section, that everything changed for her. She went from the New School in Manhattan to Franconia College in New Hampshire, and worked at Magnum Photos and at the teen magazine Ingenue. In time, she put herself on another path. When she was sixteen, her family interrupted her education, sending her to work as a nanny in New York. Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson on Antigua in 1949. Interview still frame courtesy of Stephanie Black. In her study at home in North Bennington, 2018.

James Dickey Proceedings: Truman Capote.Charles Wright A Journal of True Confessions.Elizabeth Vreeland Three Poems from Morocco.Molly Russakoff September 3, Philadelphia.William Kittredge Be Careful What You Want.More from Issue 97, Fall 1985 Buy this issue!

Fallen Angels by Deborah McClatchey