Keeper of My Kin

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.

"Stirring . . . Ferrer’s narrative offers a human warmth in the form of jokes and jolts of emotion couched in rich historical context . . . She approaches the mountains of journals, letters and documents left behind by her parents with the same rigor she applies to files in Cuba’s national archives." —The New York Times Book Review "Intimate . . . Ferrer is the ideal keeper of her kin’s stories."  —The Atlantic "[A] heartfelt memoir of love and separation . . .  With profound empathy, Ferrer illuminates the loving bonds between her parents and their children and her complex relationship with the island country that became the center of her scholarship and her identity." —Oprah Daily "Timely . . . as unsparing as it is tender." —Los Angeles Times