Ruth Behar is the Victor Haim Perera Collegiate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She is the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant, a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship, a distinguished alumna award from Wesleyan University, and an honorary doctorate in humane letters from the Hebrew Union College. Her books include The Presence of the Past in a Spanish Village, Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story, and The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart. She co-edited Women Writing Culture, one of the first books to call attention to the creative ethnographic writing of women in anthropology. Behar frequently visits and writes about her native Cuba. She has written editorials about Cuba for The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Huffington Post. She is the author of An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba and Traveling Heavy: A Memoir in between Journeys that explore her Cuban Jewish heritage. She is the editor of the pioneering anthology, Bridges to Cuba, and co-editor of The Portable Island: Cubans at Home in the World. Her documentary, "Adio Kerida/Goodbye Dear Love: A Cuban Sephardic Journey," has been shown in film festivals around the world. Together with poet Richard Blanco, she created a blog, "Bridges to/from Cuba," where Cubans across the globe can share emotional histories. Also a creative writer, her poetry is included in many collections, among them "The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry" and "The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature." She is the author most recently of Lucky Broken Girl, a coming-of-age novel, and has a forthcoming book of poems, Everything I Kept/Todo lo que guard.