[Yale-readings] Thursday, 2/16: Jamaica Kincaid

[Nancy Kuhl]

>JAMAICA KINCAID
>
>Thursday, February 16, 2006
>4:30 pm
>Sterling Memorial Library
>
>
>Critically acclaimed author Jamaica Kincaid will read selections from her 
>latest book Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya in the Sterling Memorial 
>Library Lecture Hall on Thursday February 16th at 4:30pm.
>
>Jamaica Kincaid was born as Elaine Potter Richardson in Antigua on May 
>25th, 1949. At the age of seventeen, she left the island and her family to 
>embark on a new life in the United States. She worked first in 
>Westchester, New York as an au pair for an upper class family.  She then 
>proceeded to study photography at the New School for Social Research and 
>also spent a year at Franconia College in New Hampshire. She changed her 
>name in 1973 to Jamaica Kincaid, following her family's disapproval of her 
>writing.
>Her first writing experience was a series of articles and stories for 
>Ingenue magazine including her first published short story, Girl which 
>became part of the collection At the Bottom of the River published in 
>1983. Her first novel, Annie John, followed in 1985.  It was through 
>connections at Ingenue magazine that she became acquainted with William 
>Shawn, Editor of the New Yorker magazine.  He offered her a job and for 
>almost twenty years, she was a regular contributor to the New Yorker 
>magazine, writing articles for the Talk of the Town section that were 
>published in 2001 as Talk Stories.  Among her essays, novels and memoirs 
>are A Small Place (1988), Lucy (1990), The Autobiography of My Mother 
>(1996), My Brother (1997), My Garden (Book) (1999) and Mr. Potter 
>(2002).  Her most recent book is Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya, 
>which recounts her seed collecting expedition in Asia. After more than 
>three decades of writing, she continues to be one of the most original and 
>eloquent voices in American literature.  She divides her time between 
>Vermont, where she shares a home with her husband, the composer Allen 
>Shawn and their two children, and Boston, where she teaches at Harvard 
>University's English Department.
>
>A reception will immediately follow the talk in the Library's Memorabilia 
>Room, adjacent to the Lecture Hall.
>
>Both the reading and the reception are free and open to the public.
>
>The event is generously sponsored by several campus groups, including 
>African American Studies, the Afro-American Cultural Center, Agrarian 
>Studies, American Studies, Calhoun College Master's Office, Council on 
>Latin American and Iberian Studies, James Weldon Johnson Collection of the 
>Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Library, English Sterling Memorial 
>Library, Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity, Women's, Gender, & 
>Sexuality Studies, and the Whitney Humanities Center's Working Group on 
>Nationalisms and Empires.
>
>contact: emmanuel.raymundo at yale.edu

Nancy Kuhl
Assistant Curator, The Yale Collection of American Literature
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Yale University
121 Wall Street
P.O. Box 208240
New Haven, CT 06520-8240
Phone: 203.432.2966
Fax: 203.432.4047 
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