Ruth Behar

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. Born in Havana, Cuba, she grew up in New York, and has also lived in Spain and Mexico. She is now an anthropology professor at the University of Michigan. Her memoirs for adults, An Island Called Home and Traveling Heavy, explore 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, and her honors also include a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and a Distinguished Alumna Award from Wesleyan University. She will make her fiction debut with Lucky Broken Girl, a novel for young readers that examines how the worst of wounds can teach a child a lesson about the fragile, precious beauty of life. The book is agented by Alyssa Eisner Henkin and will be out in April with Nancy Paulsen Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House.