“Keeper of My Kin”

From Pulitzer Prize–winning author Ada Ferrer comes a memoir  about migration, separation, and the love of one family forcing its way through the fissures of history.

Professor Ferrer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Cuba: An American History (Scribner, 2021) is a sweeping history of more than five hundred years of Cuban history, written in rousing and accessible prose and based on more than thirty years of travel to and research on the island. her first book, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898, was a history of the Cuban independence movement against Spain and the central role of slavery and race in its unfolding. The book won the 2000 Berkshire Book Prize for the best first book by a woman in any field of history. Her second book, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution, explored the pivotal role of the Haitian Revolution in Cuba. It won the Frederick Douglass Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University, as well as multiple prizes from the American Historical Association.

Over the years, receiving support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Dorothy and Lewis Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Commission, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Social Science Research Council, among others.

Ada Ferrer is a Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University. She is the author, most recently, of Cuba: An American History, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in history. Ada was born in Cuba, she left with her mother when she was ten months old, and grew up in a Cuban community in New Jersey. Cuba was always present, in one way or another. She traveled to the island for the first time in 1990, to see the place where she was born, to meet her family, and to conduct historical research in its archives and libraries. And has been going back ever since. Her daughters and husband have accompanied her on many research trips. And she was there when Barack Obama visited in March 2016. That same month, she traveled there with her parents. For her father, born in 1921, it was his first trip back to the island since he first left in 1962.  On a very personal level, she grasped how insufficient the many slogans and convictions about Cuba are, held on both the right and left of the political spectrum. That knowledge influenced her to turn to history and her desire to always place people first in the ways she tells it.