Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson in St John's, Antigua, in 1949, and came to New York as a teenage au pair. She was a staff writer at The New Yorker for twenty years; her novels Annie John (1985) and Lucy (1990) and the essay A Small Place (1988) made her one of the central voices of Caribbean literature. She is professor emerita of African and African American Studies at Harvard, won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985 and the Paris Review's Hadada lifetime achievement prize in 2022. She converted to Judaism in 1993 and served in that decade as president of Congregation Beth El, the synagogue in Bennington, Vermont.