Ruth Behar

Dr. Ruth Behar was born in Havana, Cuba and grew up in New York. She holds a BA from the College of Letters at Wesleyan University, and MA and PhD degrees in Anthropology from Princeton University. As a cultural anthropologist, poet, writer for young people, teacher, and public speaker, Dr. Behar is known for the compassion she brings to her quest to understand the depth of the human experience. She has lived in Spain and Mexico, and returns often to Cuba to build bridges around culture, literature, and Jewish life. In her career as a cultural anthropologist, she has written books about her travels—Translated Woman, The Vulnerable Observer, An Island Called Home, and Traveling Heavy—and is also the author of a bilingual book of poetry, Everything I Kept/Todo lo que guardé. More recently, Dr. Behar has begun writing books for young people, and she won the Pura Belpré Author Medal for her debut middle-grade novel, Lucky Broken Girl. Her new middle-grade novel, Letters from Cuba, a Sydney Taylor Notable Book, is based on her grandmother’s escape from Poland to start a new life in Cuba on the eve of WWII. Her debut picture book, Tía Fortuna’s New Home, is forthcoming in 2022. Dr. Behar was the first Latina to win a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and has been named a “Great Immigrant” by the Carnegie Corporation. She has recently been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and is the Victor Haim Perera Collegiate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.