Ruth Behar is an award-winning author exploring the vulnerability we all share.

As a storyteller, traveler, memoirist, poet, teacher, and public speaker, Ruth Behar is acclaimed for the compassion she brings to her quest to understand the depth of the human experience. She made her fiction debut with her Pura Belpré Award-Winning novel, Lucky Broken Girl, which explores how the worst of wounds can teach a child a lesson about the fragile, precious beauty of life. Her recent novel, Letters from Cuba, inspired by the story of her maternal grandmother’s courageous efforts to save her Polish Jewish family, was named a Sydney Taylor Notable Book and received an International Latino Book Award. Her debut picture book, Tía Fortuna’s New Home, a lyrical ode to cultural memory and heritage, is forthcoming in early 2022. Born in Havana, Cuba, she grew up in New York, and has also lived in Spain and Mexico. Her memoirs, The Vulnerable Observer, An Island Called Home, and Traveling Heavy, and her bilingual poetry book, Everything I Kept/Todo lo que guardé, examine her return journeys to Cuba and her search for home as an immigrant and a traveler. She was the first Latina to win a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. Her honors also include a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Distinguished Alumna Award from Wesleyan University, a Fulbright Award, an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters from Hebrew Union College, and being named a “Great Immigrant” by the Carnegie Corporation. Recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she is an anthropology professor at the University of Michigan and lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.