An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children - by Jamaica Kincaid (Hardcover)

About the Book

"In this modern-day abecedarium, Jamaica Kincaid shares her deep knowledge of plant history and nomenclature while writing about the intersections of the plant world with history, race, mythology, colonial appropriation, and independence. Accompanied by vivid, powerful illustrations by Kara Walker"--

Book Synopsis

A unique collaboration from two of America's leading artists that explores the fascinating and hidden history of the plant world.

In this witty, deeply original book, the renowned novelist Jamaica Kincaid offers an ABC of the plants that define our world and reveals the often brutal history behind them.

Kara Walker, one of America's greatest visual artists, illustrates each entry with provocative, brilliant, enthralling, many-layered watercolors.

There has never been a book like An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children--so inventive, surprising, and telling about what our gardens reveal.

Review Quotes

"In collaborating with the fiercely imaginative visual artist Kara Walker, Kincaid has transposed this mode of thinking into an amalgam of erudition, discourse, storytelling and picture book art. A simple child's garden of ABCs their "encyclopedia" is not. Kincaid's adult base, too, will gravitate toward it . . . Cunning and often anthropomorphic, the alphabet book's imagery interpolates child-driven versions of [Walker's] acidly sardonic shadow art with soft-edged, watercolor-drenched vignettes that play hide-and-seek with the letters they're called on to represent . . . Kincaid and Walker are unafraid to spin the world differently and make it matter in new ways." --Celia McGee, The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Jamaica Kincaid was born in St. John's, Antigua. Her books include At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, My Brother, Mr. Potter, and See Now Then. She lives in Vermont.

Kara Walker is best known for her candid investigation of race, gender, sexuality, and violence through silhouetted figures. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997 and a United States Artists Fellowship in 2008. Her work can be found in museums throughout the world, including the Guggenheim, MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Tate Modern. She lives in New York.