Jamaica Kincaid (/kɪnˈkeɪd/; born Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson on May 25, 1949) is an Antiguan–American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. Born in St. John's, the capital of Antigua and Barbuda, she lives in North Bennington, Vermont, and is Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence Emerita at Harvard University.

Kincaid was born on 25 May 1949 in St. John's, on Antigua. She grew up in relative poverty with her mother, Annie Richardson Drew, a literate, cultured woman and homemaker who also worked as an assistant to a local physician, and her stepfather, David Drew, a carpenter. She was very close to her mother until her three brothers were born in quick succession, starting when Kincaid was nine years old. After her brothers' births, she resented her mother, who thereafter focused primarily on the brothers' needs. Kincaid later recalled:

Our family money remained the same, but there were more people to feed and to clothe, and so everything got sort of shortened, not only material things but emotional things. The good emotional things, I got a short end of that. But then I got more of things I didn't have, like a certain kind of cruelty and neglect.

In an interview for The New York Times, Kincaid said, "The way I became a writer was that my mother wrote my life for me and told it to me."

Kincaid received a British education, as Antigua did not gain independence from the United Kingdom until 1981. Kincaid attended the Princess Margaret School and the Antiguan Girls School, and apprenticed as a seamstress. Although Kincaid was intelligent and frequently tested at the top of her class, her mother removed her from school at 16 to help support the family when her third brother was born, because her stepfather was ill and could no longer provide for the family. In 1966, when Kincaid was 16, her mother sent her to Scarsdale, an affluent suburb of New York City, to work as an au pair. After that, Kincaid refused to send money home; "she left no forwarding address and was cut off from her family until her return to Antigua 20 years later".

In 1979, Kincaid married the composer and Bennington College professor Allen Shawn, son of longtime The New Yorker editor William Shawn and brother of playwright Wallace Shawn. They have two children: a son, Harold, a music producer and songwriter; and a daughter, Annie, who works in marketing. Kincaid and Shawn divorced in 2002.

Kincaid is a keen gardener who has written extensively on the subject.

She converted to Judaism in 1993 for family reasons, and was president of Congregation Beth El, Bennington's synagogue, in the 1990s.