Ada Ferrer Wins 2026 New American Voices Award
Ada Ferrer has won the 9th Annual Institute for Immigration Research New American Voices Award for her memoir Keeper of My Kin: Memoir of an Immigrant Daughter. She accepted the award and the $5,000 prize on October 8th at the Fall for the Book Festival.
Ferrer said, “The New American Voices Award is a very special prize. Especially in a moment such as this, it is important to share immigrant stories as part of the fabric of American life. I am moved and honored to be this year’s recipient.”
Founded in 2018 by Fall for the Book and the Institute for Immigration Research, the New American Voices Award recognizes recently published works that illuminate the complexity of the human experience as told by immigrants and first-generation writers, whose work is historically underrepresented in writing and publishing.
After accepting the award on Thursday, Ferrer thanked the IIR “for all the work they do bringing immigrant voices to light.” She also thanked her family, calling them “the heart and soul of this book.” Ferrer is a historian, and Keeper of My Kin is her first work of memoir.
Founded in 2018 by Fall for the Book and the Institute for Immigration Research, the New American Voices Award recognizes recently published works that illuminate the complexity of the human experience as told by immigrants and first-generation writers, whose work is historically underrepresented in writing and publishing.
The two other finalists, Bindu Bansinath, author of Men Like Ours and Chantel Acevedo author of Cages, also read from and discussed their work at the event. Each received $1,000.
Judges Angie Cruz, Donna Hemans, and Weike Wang said of Ferrer’s book: “Keeper of My Kin by Ada Ferrer brings to life the agony of starting over: people leaving home, trying to survive, and carrying the grief of what is left behind. Through vivid imagery and a scrapbook-like accumulation of letters, documents and family stories, Ferrer gives a human face to histories too often reduced to politics, sanctions, and humanitarian crises. At the heart of the book thrums a powerful maternal lineage, and the lifelong guilt of leaving a child behind. The story is not just that of immigration but of love and separation, as well as the impossible choices families make during historic and political upheavals. A timely book!”
The two other finalists, Bindu Bansinath, author of Men Like Ours and Chantel Acevedo author of Cages, will also read from and discuss their work at the event. Each will receive $1,000.
About the Author
Ada Ferrer is Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University. From 1995 to 2024, she taught at New York University. She is the author, most recently, of Cuba: An American History, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in history, and a finalist for the Cundill History Prize. Her earlier books, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 and Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution won multiple prizes, among them the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University, three prizes from the American Historical Association, and the Berkshire Book Prize for the best first book by a woman in any field of history. Ferrer has received support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Dorothy and Lewis Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Social Science Research Council, among many others. Born in Cuba and raised in the United States, Ferrer has been traveling to and conducting research on the island since 1990.
The previous winners of the New American Voices Award are: Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance, Melissa Rivero’s The Affairs of the Falcóns, Lysley Tenorio’s The Son of Good Fortune, Patricia Engel’s Infinite Country, Sindya Bhanoo’s Seeking Fortune Elsewhere, Rachel Heng’s The Great Reclamation, Shahnaz Habib’s Airplane Mode, Shubha Sunder’s Optional Practical Training.