In New York, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Princeton historian will discuss her memoir about Cuban migration, separation, and family.
Join Americas Society to hear from Princeton historian Ada Ferrer as she talks about Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter (Scribner, 2026), her first book since winning the Pulitzer Prize in history five years ago. In the new release, Ferrer masterfully shifts between her roles as historian and family member, weaving a multigenerational tale that reaches into Cuba and her family's past to understand the circumstances and choices that led to the present.
About the book
In 1963, four years after Fidel Castro came to power, Ferrer’s mother made the agonizing decision to flee Cuba with her infant daughter, Ada, and to leave behind her nine-year-old son, Poly. That moment was but a ripple in a much larger story of a world historical revolution. Yet, in another more intimate family history, that choice was a crossroads, ultimately inseparable from who and what they all became.
We see key historical events through the eyes of the family: the grandmother who raised Poly after Ada’s departure, a Black woman born a year after the end of slavery in Cuba; Ada’s parents, forced to invent themselves anew in a foreign land; and two brothers left behind—Poly and another, once-secret brother named Juan José, both of whose lives were marked irrevocably by revolution and family separation. Moving between Cuba and the United States and then back again, the book unpacks the experience and emotion of migration, in the moment of separation and over the long-term, for those who left and those who stayed.