Jamaica Kincaid

Novelist, essayist, and short story writer Jamaica Kincaid will read from her new novel, Mr. Potter. In this latest book, what is possibly her most luminous and ambitious work to date, the author breathes life into an individual consciousness emerging gloriously out of an unexamined life. Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson in St. John’s, Antigua, West Indies in 1949. After emigrating to the United States and becoming a U.S. citizen, she married composer Allen Shawn and, in 1973, changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid. With the 1983 publication of her book of short stories, At the Bottom of the River, Kincaid made her arrival as an important new voice in American fiction, receiving the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983. She is the author of six novels, and she credits the United States as the place where “I did find myself and did find my voice… what I really feel about America is that it’s given me a place to be myself–but myself as I was formed somewhere else.” Kincaid’s obsession with the island of Antigua comes to life under the gaze of Mr. Potter, an illiterate taxi chauffeur who makes his living along the roads that pass the only towns he has ever seen and the graveyard where he will be buried. J. B. Davis Auditorium, Macalester College, 1600 Grand Ave., St. Paul; Ruminator Books, (651) 659-0587