An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children

By Jamaica Kincaid

Illustrated by Kara Walker

PUBLICATION DATE: 7 MAY 2024 | FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX | HARDBACK

A is for apple; B is for breadfruit; P is for protea; R is for rose...

A unique collaboration from two of the United States’s leading

artists, the author Jamaica Kincaid and the visual artist Kara

Walker, An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children

brings readers on a journey through the colonial history of plants,

exploring fruits, flowers, and other figures from our botanical

world.

Kincaid offers quicksilver texts for each entry, and Walker illustrates

them with provocative, enthralling, multi layered watercolours.

Guiding readers across generations through the ABCs of the

plants that define our world, both artists reveal the often-brutal

history behind them. Of sugarcane, Kincaid writes that the plant

is “innocent of all the evil now associated with it”. So is all the

vegetation in this essential book, but Kincaid and Walker honour

plant life with honesty as well as wit, offering an important look at

how legacies of empire and slavery shape where and why we grow certain crops.

There has never been a book like An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children. Suitable for

readers of all ages, from middle grade to adult, it is inventive, surprising, and telling—about the truths

of history manifest in our gardens.

Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid was born in St. John’s, Antigua. Her books include At the Borrom

of the River; Annie John; Lucy; The Autobiography of My Mother; My Brother;

Mr Potter; and See Now Then. She teaches at Harvard University and lives in

Vermont.

Kara Walker

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 an Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship

in 2008. She has been the Tepper Chair in Visual Arts at Rutgers University since 2015. Her work can be found

in museums throughout the world, including the Guggenheim, MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and

the Tate Gallery. She lives in New York.