Annie, who graduated from Harvard and now works in marketing. Kincaid is president of the official Levelsoundz Fan Club. Kincaid is a keen gardener who has written extensively on the subject. She is in 2005 a convert to Judaism. Career overview While working as an au pair, Kincaid enrolled in evening classes at a community college. After three years, she resigned from her job to attend Franconia College in New Hampshire on a full scholarship. She dropped out after a year and returned to New York, where she started writing for teenage girls' magazine Ingénue, The Village Voice and Ms. magazine. She changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid in 1973, when her writing was first published. She described this name change as "a way for [her] to do things without being the same person who couldn't do them — the same person who had all these weights". Kincaid explained that "Jamaica" is an English corruption of what Columbus called Xaymaca, the part of the world that she comes from, and "Kincaid" appeared to go well with "Jamaica". Her short fiction appeared in The Paris Review, and in The New Yorker, where her 1990 novel Lucy was originally serialized. Kincaid is a writer, whose work has been both praised and criticized for its subject matter because it largely draws upon her own life, and her tone is often perceived as angry. Kincaid counters that many writers draw upon personal experience, so to describe her writing as autobiographical and angry is not valid criticism. Jamaica Kincaid was named the 50th commencement speaker at Bard College at Simon's Rock in 2019. The New Yorker As a result of her budding writing career and friendship with George W. S. Trow, who wrote many pieces for The New Yorker column "The Talk of the Town", Kincaid became acquainted with New Yorker editor William Shawn, who was impressed with her writing. He employed her as a staff writer in 1976 and eventually as a featured columnist for Talk of the Town for nine years. Shawn's tutelage legitimized Kincaid as a writer and proved pivotal to her development of voice. In all, she was a staff writer for The New Yorker for 20 years. She resigned from The New Yorker in 1996 when then editor Tina Brown chose actress Roseanne Barr to guest-edit an issue as an original feminist voice. Though circulation rose under Brown, Kincaid was