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Ada Ferrer is Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University. From 1995 to 2024, she taught at New York 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, and a finalist for the Cundill History Prize. Her earlier books, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 and Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution won multiple prizes, among them the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University, three prizes from the American Historical Association, and the Berkshire Book Prize for the best first book by a woman in any field of history. Ferrer has received support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Dorothy and Lewis Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Social Science Research Council, among many others. Born in Cuba and raised in the United States, Ferrer has been traveling to and conducting research on the island since 1990.
""Powerful and eloquent, Keeper of My Kin explores love of family and love of place—and, for those who are forced to flee, what is left behind and what stays with them forever."" —Jeannette Walls, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Castle “Love is everywhere in this book: the deep romantic bond between her parents, the author’s intense attachment to both of them and to other relatives, and to the troubled island country she lived in for only ten months, yet became the center of her scholarship, her thinking, and her identity. As heartbreaking as this story often is, it is equally heartwarming, filled with love of all kinds.” —Kirkus (starred review) ""Keeper of My Kin is an engrossing tale of what it takes to make and keep a family across generations, even in the face of political turmoil and impossible choices. Ada Ferrer is a deeply moving truth-teller who, in recovering the lives of her kin, rediscovers herself. On her bold and beautiful pages, we learn that migration has never been a story of politics and power alone. At its core, it is a saga about family love. A new window onto our own moment, this book is a gift to a nation striving to better understand the stakes of every stop, detention, and expulsion carried out today. It is a balm and brave call to conscience."" —Martha S. Jones, author of The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir “The Ferrer family will forever stay with you for theirs is the story of all Cubans in the last seven decades. If you read this tender and brilliant book as I did—drying tears and holding my breath—it’ll be yours to cherish as well. A triumphant memoir of love and loss.” —Mirta Ojito, author of Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus and the USA Today bestselling novel Deeper than the Ocean ""'What country, friends, is this?' asks Viola, washed ashore in Illyria at the beginning of Twelfth Night. Here, another island, Cuba, and the shores of America; another wine-dark, enclosed, estranging sea; other odysseys. Ferrer has written a history that is also myth: of those left behind, lost brothers, found families, old and new lives. Keeper of My Kin is exhilarating to read; I loved it; I loved knowing more about all the departures and returns, the losses and reparations, that have made the modern world."" —Carolyn Steedman, author of Landscape for a Good Woman
