About the Author
Ada Ferrer, who is originally from Havana and grew up in a Cuban community in New Jersey, is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Cuba: An American History. Cuba chronicles more than five hundred years of Cuban history and its relations with the United States. She is also the author of Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898, winner of the Berkshire Book Prize. Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University and the Frederick Katz, Wesley Logan, and James A. Rawley prizes from the American Historical Association.
Ada Ferrer is a frequent public speaker, at colleges, libraries, and historical societies. She discusses Cuba’s past and its complex ties with the United States. Her keynotes leave audiences with unexpected insights into the history of both countries and helps them to imagine a new relationship with Cuba.
Ferrer graduated from Vassar College with an AB degree in English. She holds a Master’s in History from University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in History from the University of Michigan. Currently, she is a Professor of History at Princeton University. She taught at New York University from 1995 to 2024, where she was the Julius Silver Professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She was a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow and has received support for her research from organizations including the Dorothy and Lewis Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Commission, and more. She is the co-curator of “Visionary Aponte: Art and Black Freedom,” an exhibit on carpenter and artist José Antonio Aponte, that has been shown at NYU, Duke University, and Havana’s Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales.
She has written for The New Yorker and The Washington Post, among others, and appeared on CNN and NPR. She lives in New York City with her family.
Raves and Reviews
Praise for Keeper of My Kin
Ada Ferrer’s Keeper of My Kin is a brilliant testament to the power of storytelling. A devastatingly human portrayal of the effects of migration, family secrets, and the history that binds and moves us, this book is a must-read for anyone who has ever loved. With enormous tenderness and an unflinching pursuit of truth, Ferrer writes her family into history, into memoir, into public record, into sunlight, where they—where we all—have always deserved to be.”
—Javier Zamora, New York Times bestselling author of Solito
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
[Ferrer] braids a clear-eyed account of recent Cuban history with an empathetic catalog of its effects on her family. It’s a memorable and heartrending achievement.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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)
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
Praise for Cuba
The heroes of Ada Ferrer’s narrative are the island’s nationalists and reformers. . . . [She] reveals a relationship that is deeper and more troubled than it may appear. . . . Yet readers will close Ms. Ferrer’s fascinating book with a sense of hope. . . . moving.”
—The Economist
Cuba focuses on the equivocal relationship of the two countries, and presents it convincingly as symbiotic. . . . exemplary . . . [full of] lively insights and lucid prose. . . . By being equally severe with Cuban leaders and US leaders, Ms. Ferrer achieves an honorable objective: pleasing nobody by being just.”
—Wall Street Journal
An encompassing look back at Cuba, from before the arrival of Columbus to the present day. . . . a moving chronicle of the relationship between the United States and Cuba and what that’s meant for both sides.”
—Forbes
A fluid, consistently informative history of the long, inextricable link between Cuba and the US, well rendered by a veteran Cuban American historian. . . . Ferrer is an endlessly knowledgeable guide. . . . She is especially good in delineating how a distinct Cuban identity was forged over the centuries. A wonderfully nuanced history of the island nation and its often troubled dealings with its gigantic and voracious neighbor.”
—Kirkus (starred review)
