RUTH BEHAR is the Newbery Honor Award-winning and Pura Belpré Award-winning author of Lucky Broken Girl, Letters from Cuba, and Across So Many Seas (Nancy Paulsen Books). She was born in Havana, grew up in New York, and has lived in Spain and Mexico. Her work also includes the Sephardic picture book Tía Fortuna’s New Home: A Jewish Cuban Journey; the acclaimed travel books An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba and Traveling Heavy: A Memoir In Between Journeys; and poetry and memoir. She was the first Latina to win a MacArthur “Genius Grant” and has received other honors including a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship and being named a “Great Immigrant” by the Carnegie Corporation. An anthropology professor at the University of Michigan, she lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
