Jamaica Kincaid was born on May 25, 1949 to Roderick Potter, a carpenter/cabinet maker, and Annie Richardson, a housewife. She grew up in poverty on the small West Indian Island of Antigua. Kincaid, whose given name is Elaine Potter Richardson, immigrated at the age of seventeen from her British-ruled 10-by-12-mile island home to New York, where she worked as an au pair for three years. While living in New York, she graduated from high school, studied photography at the New School for Social Research, and spent a little over a year at Franconia College in New Hampshire.

After various receptionist and secretarial positions, Kincaid began her career as a writer with an interview piece on Gloria Steinem for Seventeen magazine. In 1978, she was hired as a staff writer for the New Yorker, where she worked until 1995. Kincaid currently lives in Vermont with her husband Allen Shawn...