Jamaica Kincaid to read at Tulane Nov. 13

Esteemed author Jamaica Kincaid will give a reading at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 13, in Dixon Hall on the campus of Tulane University. The event is free and open to the public.

Kincaid is the author of five novels, five nonfictions books, one story collection, and fiction and nonfiction published in the best magazines in English, including regular pieces in the New Yorker about gardening. She has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and many others. Each book she publishes is an occasion. Her most recent, See Now Then, a novel, came out in 2013.

From an interview with Kincaid in Guernica:

When I start to write something, I suppose I want it to change me, to make me into something not myself. And while I’m doing it, I really have the feeling that this time, at the end of it, I will be other than myself. Of course, every time I end a book, I look down at myself and I’m just the same. I’m always disappointed that I’m just the same, but not enough to never do it again! I get right back up and I start something else, and I think this time–this time—I really will be transformed into something other than this tawdry, ordinary thing, sitting on the bed and drinking cold coffee. When I write a book, I hope to be beyond mortal by the time I’m finished.

More immediately, I’m trying to earn a living in the way that is most enjoyable to me. I love the world of literature, and I hope to support myself in it. I come from the small island of Antigua and I always wanted to write; I just didn’t know that it was possible. I would pretend when I was a child that I was Charlotte Brontë, because I’d read Jane Eyrewhen I was ten and, although I didn’t understand it, I loved the idea that this woman had written a book. I wanted to be her.