She can talk endlessly on any subject, it seems, and her speech is peppered with personal wisdom in spontaneous, colorful phrases.

Some of those phrases center on the relationship between mothers and daughters, a recurring theme in her writing. "I'm always suspicious of women who don't like children," Kincaid says. "I think they don't like themselves."

Some refer to her childhood in Antigua, an island in the West Indies.

"It was typical of a childhood anywhere," Kincaid says. "I was miserable. A child is a powerless person. Powerless people are always miserable."

And sometimes she focuses on subjects she finds less clear and harder to define--subjects like race.

Kincaid is a visiting lecturer in the Afro-American Studies Department on a campus that constantly grapples with issues of race and ethnicity. To many, her work may seem particularly timely and significant.

Harper says students might want to examine her work in the context of campus events, and consider "how the issues of identity that they're grappling with on campus are really related to much larger issues of identity."

But Kincaid, who feels uneasy defining even herself, is uncomfortable with much of the language and rhetoric that often characterizes campus discussions on race.

"This idea of race is so odd," she says, earnestly and sincerely. "I believe your ethnicity is a controlling force for other people, but it's got nothing to do with you.

"I think left alone, I wouldn't say I'm Black. I don't know I'm Black until someone tells me I am," Kincaid continues. "It's quite true I'm Black, But I can't say that I find any solace in it, or I find any particular pride in it, But it's just a fact."

One of the great things about coming to the United States, Kincaid says, was the freedom to be different--a freedom she didn't have in her more homogeneous homeland.

Had she written her books in the West Indies, she says, "the people I wrote for wouldn't have accepted them...it would have seemed to them that I was putting on airs."

Kincaid travelled here in 1966, at the age of 17, to attend college and to "better myself." While her stories are usually set in the west Indies, her perspective has necessarily changed.

"I'm sort of someone with a dual personality," Kincaid says. The American side is used to privilege, accustomed to taking more than her share of the world's wealth. The Antiguan side is a native of a third world country, no stranger to life without the simplest necessities.

"I...remember that I was the person at the other end of the stick," she says. "But it doesn't stop me--does it?--from eating and having more than I should."