Jamaica Kincaid will receive the Los Angeles Review of Books/Occidental College Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of her exemplary career and body of work that has significantly influenced the literary field and readership in the United States.
Location:
Choi Auditorium
Event Date: Nov. 9, 2026
The Los Angeles Review of Books in cooperation with Occidental College's Center for Partnerships with Los Angeles, the Department of English, and the Dean of the College are pleased to bring renowned author Jamaica Kincaid to Occidental College in conversation with Robert Faggen.
Join us in Choi Auditorium as she discusses critical themes from her career.
Jamaica Kincaid is a writer, novelist, and professor. A staff writer at The New Yorker from 1974-1996, she published her debut story collection At the Bottom of the River in 1983. Kincaid has since written five acclaimed novels, including Annie John, Lucy, and Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children. Her non-fiction includes My Brother, a chronicle of her brother’s battle with AIDS, as well as A Small Place, Among Flowers, and, most recently, Putting Myself Together, which was awarded the2026 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She has received a Guggenheim Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, the Prix Femina Étranger, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Clifton Fadiman Medal, the Dan David Prize for Literature, and, in 2022, the Hadada Award from The Paris Review. She is Professor Emerita of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and lives in Vermont, where she is a Comedian to The Plants.
Robert Faggen is the Barton Evans and H. Andrea Neves Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College. He is author of Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost, as well as other works on modern poetry. He is completing a biography of Ken Kesey. Faggen received an A.B. from Princeton University and a Ph.D. from Harvard.
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photo by Bob Anderson