Ruth Behar was born in Havana, Cuba and grew up in New York. She has lived in Spain and Mex­i­co and has returned to Cuba to build bridges around cul­ture and art. She is the author of the prize-win­ning mid­dle grade nov­els, Lucky Bro­ken Girl and Let­ters from Cuba, as well as the pic­ture book, Tía Fortuna’s New Home, which have all been PJ Library selec­tions. Her new pic­ture book, Pepi­ta Meets Bebi­ta, was co-authored with her son, Gabriel Frye-Behar, and address­es tran­si­tions in a new fam­i­ly. Her lat­est mid­dle grade nov­el, Across So Many Seas, a work of Sephardic his­tor­i­cal fic­tion, will be released in Feb­ru­ary, 2024. She lives in Ann Arbor, where she is a Dis­tin­guished Uni­ver­si­ty Pro­fes­sor of Anthro­pol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michigan.