From the Anthropology department’s news page:

Ruth Behar, Professor of Anthropology, Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences
U-M professors Ruth Behar, Ruth Scodel and Karen Smith are among the newest members named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The three, all of whom are from LSA, are part of a class of 252 artists, scholars, scientists and leaders in the public, nonprofit and private sectors. Also elected were U-M alumnus and CNN chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta and media entrepreneur and philanthropist Oprah Winfrey.
“We are honoring the excellence of these individuals, celebrating what they have achieved so far, and imagining what they will continue to accomplish,” said David Oxtoby, president of the American Academy. “The past year has been replete with evidence of how things can get worse. This is an opportunity to illuminate the importance of art, ideas, knowledge and leadership that can make a better world.”
Behar, the Victor Haim Perera Collegiate Professor of Anthropology and professor of anthropology, is a poet, writer for young people, teacher and public speaker. She is known for the compassion she brings to her quest to understand the depth of the human experience. She has lived in Spain and Mexico, and returns often to Cuba to build bridges around culture, literature and Jewish life.

On the book review blog The Shepherd, Tim Hannigan lists The Vulnerable Observer as one of “The Best Books That Capture The Complexities Of Writing About The Real World”:

The Vulnerable Observer

By Ruth Behar

Why this book?

Ruth Behar is an academic, but this deeply personal book is nothing like your typical academic treatise. It’s part memoir, part essay collection, part manifesto for a more ethical – and more honest – way of recording the world and your own interactions with it. What Behar calls for is the “vulnerable observation” of the title: a recognition of the way your own personal and cultural baggage colours your way of seeing, and of the way that you, the writer, are always part of the story. What this leads to is the realisation that objectivity is not just unattainable, but probably undesirable. Behar aims her clarion call at her own profession, anthropology, but what she says applies as much to journalists, travel writers and anyone else who writes about the real world.

The cover for Ruth’s new middle-grade novel was just revealed by the Nerdy Book Club, along with an essay by Ruth on the origins of the novel:

“Though my new middle-grade novel takes place in the Cuban countryside in the late 1930s, Letters from Cuba is my heart’s response to the current news of deportations, immigrant travel bans, and international refugee crises. How, I wondered, could I talk back to the cruel anti-immigrant climate of our era? It occurred to me that by setting my novel in another time and place, I could offer a fresh perspective on how we think about immigrants, especially immigrant children. Because seeing immigrant children in cages hurts us all….”

Read the entire essay, “Inspiration for Letters from Cuba,” here.

In this personal essay for the on-line Anthropology journal Sapiens, Ruth reflects on the death of her friend and childhood nanny in Cuba, the gifts they exchanged over many decades of reunion, and the cultural and economic changes on the island since the early 1990s.

Remembering the Woman Who Was My Second Mother in Cuba

“When my cellphone rang on the morning of December 12, 2018, and I saw the call was from Paco Lopez in Miami, I took a deep breath. I told myself that he did sometimes call just to say hello or update me on the family in Cuba. There was no reason to expect the worst. But I knew that one day he’d phone me with bad news. This was the day.”

Macondo Writers Workshop Brings a Multitude of Voices to San Antonio

In July, 2019, Ruth helped lead the Macondo Writers Workshop in San Antonio, Texas. Ruth co-taught a master class in creative writing with Sandra Cisneros, and participated in a widely attended public reading at the San Antonio central library.

Cuba’s Slow Rebirth

The anthropologist Ruth Behar grew up traumatized by what her parents lost in Fidel Castro’s revolution. Now she is trying to understand what Cuba has become. New York Times, December 4, 2018.

Swan Isle Press has announced the publication of Ruth’s debut book of poetry, Everything I Kept / Todo lo que guardé, in a bilingual Spanish and English edition with illustrations by Cuban artist and poet Rolando Estévez.

Read all about it here.