Does anybody know any web sites about Jamaica Kincaid?

Question

I am doing a research project and I need to find some poetry and information about Jamaica Kincaid. Any help will be greatly appreciated. :)

Answer 1

Best Answer - Chosen by Voters

tons of links for you.

Jamaica Kincaid was born in 1949 as Elaine Potter Richardson on the island of Antigua. She lived with her stepfather, a carpenter, and her mother until 1965 when she was sent to Westchester, New York to work as an au pair. In Antigua, she completed her secondary education under the British system due to Antigua's status as a British colony until 1967. She went on to study photography at the New York School for Social Research after leaving the family for which she worked, and also attended Franconia College in New Hampshire for a year. Her first writing experience involved a series of articles for Ingenue magazine. In 1973, she changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid because her family disapproved of her writing. Through her writing, she befriended George W.S. Trow, a writer for the New Yorker, who began writing "Talk of the Town" pieces about her. As a result, Kincaid met the editor of the magazine, William Shawn, who offered her a job. Kincaid later married Shawn's son, Allen, a composer and Bennington College professor, and they now have two children.

http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Kinca…

http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/experien…

the last link will take you to several website with information that you can use for your research.

good luck with your research.

Answer 2

A Brief Biography of Jamaica Kincaid
David P. Lichtenstein '99, Brown University, Contributing Editor, Caribbean Web
Jamaica Kincaid's twisted quest for self began with her May 25, 1949 birth in Antigua. She was then christened Elaine Potter Richardson, but when she fled the island at the age of seventeen, she left her family as well as her name behind and entered North America as Jamaica Kincaid. Her life should seem familiar to those who know her heavily autobiographical work. She worked first in New York City as an au pair, for an upper class family much like the one pictured in Lucy. She left this work to study photography at the New School for Social Research and then went on to Franconia College in New Hampshire (but did not take a degree) before returning to New York. There she became a regular contributor to the New Yorker magazine, writing for nearly twenty years (1976-1995) before the arrival of new management convinced her to leave. She now resides in Bennington Vermont with her husband and children.

Kincaid's status as an exile informs so much of her writing. It allows (or perhaps forces) her to maintain distance from both her past and her present, as she critically examines the suffocating smallness (and small-mindedness) of her native Antigua, then juxtaposes it against the ignorant opulence of North America. Her narrators too seem alienated from all those around them, seeking both control over and freedom from these human connections known as relationships. But no discussion, no matter how brief, can be complete without mention of the central relationship in Kincaid's life--that with her mother. Kincaid's tight, lyrical prose guides the reader through her tortured recollections of her mother, as that relationship takes on the dual gravity of mother-daughter relationships that many readers can relate to as well as of the hegemonic interactions between mother country (here England) and daughter island (Antigua). Stacking these parallel visions on top of each other and infusing them with her own feelings of anger and suffocation, Kincaid draws the reader through the struggle for personal development not only of her narrators but of the writer herself.

Jamaica Kincaid's life reads like an American Cinderella story: born and raised in poverty on the island of Antigua, West Indies; unloved by an unresponsive and often abusive mother who shipped her off to the United States at 17 to be an au pair (Kincaid insists on the word "servant" to describe her employment status); "discovered" on the streets of Manhattan by New Yorker columnist George Trow, who brought her into the fold of the magazine by printing one of her articles in the "Talk of the Town" section; became a celebrated fiction writer (Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother) and gardening columnist; married the son of legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn; and moved to the idyll of North Bennington, Vermont, where she now writes, gardens, teaches, and tends to her family, which includes two beautiful children.

Why, then, does this 48-year-old woman, who speaks with an accent both lilting and sweet, feel it's her "duty to make everyone a little less happy"? Mother Jones spoke with Kincaid about her continuing obsessions and her upcoming book, My Brother (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a nonfiction account of her youngest sibling, who died of AIDS in 1996.

I even found a stanza of her poem if it cud help....!!?
Behold the Child among his new-born blisses
A six years' Darling of a pigmy size!
See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
With light upon him from his father's eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learned art. [1]

Source(s):

http://www.literature-study-online.com/e…