City of Asylum welcomes Jamaica Kincaid, winner of the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction and the American Book Award, to the Alphabet City stage this fall. The celebrated writer and gardener will engage in conversation with Curator for World Literature, Anderson Tepper, to discuss her life and work, with special focus on her latest book An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children.

“There’s a special place in my reading heart for the experience of first discovering Jamaica Kincaid’s books. I remember them as if in a trance: At the Bottom of the River, Lucy, My Brother, and much more (all now being reissued by Picador). Her latest work, An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children, combines her deep knowledge of gardening and plant-life with her concerns about our dark, entangled history. Whatever she touches turns into a small miracle.” —Anderson Tepper, Curator for World Literature at City of Asylum

An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children is a witty, deeply original book for all ages, in which Jamaica Kincaid offers an ABC of the plants that define our world—and reveals their often brutal past. Immensely inventive, surprising, and telling about what our gardens reveal, complete with provocative and brilliant watercolor illustrations by Kara Walker, one of America’s greatest visual artists, there has never been another book like it.

The program consists of a brief reading, followed by a conversation and audience Q&A moderated by Anderson Tepper.

Purchase your own copy of Jamaica’s book, An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children, at City of Asylum Bookstore and get it signed at the program.