It is Monday afternoon, the fiction writing seminar's introductory meeting has just ended, and a swarm of students surrounds visiting lecturer Jamaica Kincaid, heaping praise on the lanky writer.

Out of the throng, a student approaches, smiling shyly and shifting her weight from side to side.

"I feel a little unworthy," she says. "I'm just a freshman."

"Ohhhh," Kincaid gasps, grinning, grasping the first-year by the shoulders.

"I haven't read any of your work," the student continues.

"Well, I haven't read any of your work, either," Kincaid says reassuringly.

Not everyone knows Jamica Kincaid; unlike other visiting professors, notably her colleague Spike Lee, Kincaid can walk down Cambridge streets unnoticed. Her apparel is unassuming--a T-shirt, shorts, clogs.

Her demeanor is subdued--that is, until you get her going.

Kincaid, 43, is the author of the 1983 novel Annie John and the much praised story collection, At the Bottom of the River. She remains a frequent contributor to The New Yorker.

This fall, she will teach, an Afro-Am seminar, "Domestic Life in Literature," and a fiction writing workshop.

A mother of two, Kincaid says she came to Harvard for one reason: Afro-Am Chair Henry Louis Gates Jr., who has convinced a number of prominent figures to teach in the department.

"He's very persuasive," she says. "It's hard to tell him no if he really wants you to do something."

Philip B. Harper, an assistant professor in the English and Afro-Am departments, calls Kincaid "a writers of consciousness."

Harper, who uses Kincaid's work in several of his classes, says her writing follows the tradition of such modernists as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

And while her fiction is often taught in Courses that dwell on political themes, Harper says, it is not political.