Ruth Behar (born 1956) is a Cuban-American anthropologist and writer. Her work includes academic studies, as well as poetry, memoir, and literary fiction. As an anthropologist, she has argued for the open adoption and acknowledgement of the subjective nature of research and participant-observers. She is a recipient of the Belpré Medal. Life and work Behar was born in Havana, Cuba in 1956 to a Jewish-Cuban family of Sephardic Turkish, and Ashkenazi Polish and Russian ancestry. She was four when her family immigrated to the US following Fidel Castro's gaining power in the revolution of 1959. More than 94% of Cuban Jews left the country at that time, together with many others of the middle and upper classes. Behar attended local schools and studied as an undergraduate at Wesleyan University, receiving her B.A. in 1977. She studied cultural anthropology at Princeton University, earning her doctorate in 1983. She travels regularly to Cuba and Mexico to study aspects of culture, as well as to investigate her family's roots in Jewish Cuba. She has specialized in studying the lives of women in developing societies. Behar is a professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Her literary work is featured in the Michigan State University's Michigan Writers Series. A writer of anthropology, essays, poetry and fiction, Behar focuses on issues related to women and feminism. Lucky Broken Girl Lucky Broken Girl (2017) is multicultural coming-of-age novel for young adults, based on the author's childhood in the 1960s. Ruthie Mizrahi and her family recently emigrated from Castro's Cuba to New York City. Just when she's finally beginning to gain confidence in her mastery of English –and enjoying her reign as her neighborhood's hopscotch queen – a horrific car accident leaves her in a body cast and confined to her bed for a long recovery. As Ruthie's world shrinks because of her inability to move, her powers of observation and her heart grow larger and she comes to understand how fragile life is, how vulnerable we all are as human beings, and how friends, neighbors, and the power of the arts can sweeten even the worst of times. Writing for Cuba Counterpoints, Julie Schwietert Collazo writes, "Behar, without fail, always seems to be writing with the goal of honoring her own history, experiences, and feelings, without ever denying or excluding those of others, and in Lucky Broken Girl the