(TOMS RIVER, NJ) -- The Ocean County College Foundation welcomes award-winning writer Jamaica Kincaid to the Jay and Linda Grunin Center for the Arts on Monday, October 24. The event, part of the Blauvelt Speaker Series, is free and open to the public.  The event takes place at 11:00am.

Join us for a conversation with one of the most highly-acclaimed writers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Kincaid’s essays, stories and novels address such universal themes as family relationships, coming of age, and establishing one’s personal identity. Her books are informed by her status as an uprooted subject, born in the Caribbean island of Antigua but living in North America. 

After moving to New York to work as an au pair, Kincaid studied photography at the New York School for Social Research and attended Franconia College in New Hampshire. From 1974 to 1996, she served as a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her first book, a collection of short stories titled At the Bottom of the River, was published in 1983, followed two years later by her first novel, Annie John, the coming-of-age story of a willful ten-year-old growing up in Antigua. Subsequent novels include Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, and Mr. Potter, which follows the life of an illiterate taxi chauffeur. In addition to novels and memoirs, Kincaid has written A Small Place, a short, powerful book about the effects of colonialism that subverts the cliché of Antigua as a tourist’s paradise. Her love of gardening has also led to several books on the subject, including My Garden and Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya, a memoir about a seed-gathering trek with three botanist friends.

Kincaid is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the 2022 recipient of the Hadada Award for lifetime achievement from The Paris Review. Her other accolades include the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dan David Prize for Literature, the Clifton Fadiman Medal, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and the Prix Femina Étranger award. She currently teaches at Harvard University and lives in Vermont.

Advance registration is required. For tickets, register at grunincenter.org or call the box office at 732-255-0500. 

This program is presented in collaboration with the Visiting Writers’ Reading Series and Ocean County Library Foundation. 

The Blauvelt Speaker Series is funded in part by the generosity of the late Bradford Thomas & Eleanor G. Blauvelt and The Wintrode Family Foundation. Additional sponsors include Carluccio, Leone, Dimon, Doyle & Sacks, LLC; The Citta Foundation; Arlene and Frank Dupignac, Jr.; Grunin Foundation; Kean Ocean; Stella and