Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellows in Letters

Jamaica Kincaid

Class of Fall 2025

Novelist; Professor Emerita of African and African American Studies, Harvard University

What Cassandra, Daughter of Potter Not Priam, Said

At the Academy, Kincaid will work on a new novel, “What Cassandra, Daughter of Potter Not Priam, Said.” Drawing on the figure of Cassandra in Greek mythology, the novel involves Memory and her nine known daughters, all of whom make up the foundation of civilization. Memory’s ethereal tenth daughter, Cassandra, speaks only the truth. She writes not with a pen, but with her tongue. Those with whom she has shared the truth wish to remove her tongue and replace it with a utensil separate from her body. Saving her tongue is a voyage all in itself.

Jamaica Kincaid is a writer and Professor Emerita of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She holds honorary degrees from Amherst College, Tufts University, Middlebury College, and the University of the West Indies, among others. Celebrated for her evocative reflections on family, memory, gender, colonialism, her native Antigua, and gardening, Kincaid is the author of numerous award-winning and widely translated essays, short stories, and novels, including At the Bottom of the River (1983), Annie John (1985), Lucy (1990), A Small Place (1988), The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), My Brother (1997), Mr. Potter (2002), Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalayas (2005), See Now Then (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), and most recently An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children (with Kara Walker; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024). Her “Talk of the Town” columns for The New Yorker appeared in Talk Stories (2001). She is the winner of the 2022 Paris Review Hadada Prize for Lifetime Achievement, 2017 Dan David Prize, a 2014 American Book Award and 2000 Prix Femina Étranger, among many other awards. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.