Ruth Behar (1956) was born in Havana, Cuba and grew up in New York. As a cultural anthropologist, she has written about her journeys in her books, An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba and Traveling Heavy: A Memoir in Between Journeys. As a bilingual poet, she is the author of Everything I Kept/Todo lo que guardé. As an author of books for young people, Behar won the Pura Belpré Author Medal for her debut middle grade novel, Lucky Broken Girl, and her second novel, Letters from Cuba, is a Sydney Taylor Notable Book and received an International Latino Book Award. Behar’s latest work is a debut picture book, Tía Fortuna’s New Home, published simultaneously in Spanish as El nuevo hogar de Tía Fortuna, a Cuban Sephardic story about intergenerational memory set in Miami. Behar is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was named a “Great Immigrant” by the Carnegie Corporation. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and is a Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

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