A READING BY JAMAICA KINCAID @ The Kelly Writers House

A READING BY JAMAICA KINCAID

Kelly Writers House Fellows Program

6:30 PM in person

rsvp required: whfellow@writing.upenn.edu

JAMAICA KINCAID is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, and gardener from St. John’s Antigua. She now lives in Vermont and works as a Professor of African American Studies in Residence at Harvard University. In 1965 she left Antigua for New York to work as an au pair, then studied photography at the New York School for Social Research and attended Franconia College in New Hampshire. She published her first collection of short stories At the Bottom of the River, in 1983. Her autobiographical novels with an emphasis on mother-daughter relationships, Annie John (1984) and Lucy (1990) followed shortly after. Her consideration of family relationships, Antigua, and colonialism reached its fiercest in The Autobiography of My Mother (1996) and My Brother (1997). Her numerous awards include the Guggenheim Award for Fiction and the 1999 Lanon Literacy Award for Fiction. She was also a Kelly Writers House Fellow in 2007.

The Kelly Writers House Fellows program enables us to realize two unusual goals. We want to make it possible for the youngest writers and writer-critics to have sustained contact with authors of great accomplishment in an informal atmosphere. We also want to resist the time-honored distinction — more honored in practice than in theory — between working with eminent writers on the one hand and studying literature on the other. .

During the visit of each Fellow, a reading will take place on Monday at 6:30 PM. On Tuesday at 10 AM the Writers House will host a brunch followed by a one-hour interview/conversation; attendance for both programs is by rsvp only (rsvp to whfellow@writing.upenn.edu). Both programs will be broadcast live worldwide on KWH-TV and both of the Monday and Tuesday programs will generally be available as a link from this page a week or so after the events.

The coordinator of the Writers House Fellows program is Sophia DuRose.

Seminar notes are available here: