Cuban-American Ada Ferrer Wins 2022 Pulitzer Prize for History

May 12, 2022

"Cuban: An American History", a book about the history of Cuba from the arrival of the Spanish to the contemporary era written by Cuban-American Ada Ferrer, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History.

Ferrer, a professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University, was already recognized this year for that same work by the newspaper Los Angeles Times, in its category for best history book.

Upon receiving the award, Ferrer wrote on her Twitter account that she was left "speechless".

Nicole Eustace, with "Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America", shared the prize in the same category.

The winners are determined by a jury based at Columbia University in New York. Last year, the Pulitzers awarded coverage by several U.S. media outlets of the effects of the coronavirus pandemic and the protests following the death of African-American George Floyd.

The Pulitzer Prize winners were announced for the 106th time in New York. Former AP journalist Marjorie Miller, who took on her role as prizes administrator in April, announced the winners through a live broadcast in which she also announced a special mention to the journalists of Ukraine for their "courage, resilience and commitment" during the war with Russia.

According to its author, "Cuban: An American History", is the result of more than 30 years of work and "of a whole lifetime of changing perspectives between the country where I was born and the country where I made my life. It is, at the same time, a history that I have inherited and a history that I have created from many other possible ones. It is, in other words, what I have made of my sometimes heavy inheritance".

Ada Ferrer, born in Cuba, is a professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University, where she has been teaching since 1995.

She is the author of Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 (The University of North Carolina Press, 1999), winner of the 2000 Berkshire Book Prize for best first book by a woman in any field of history, and of Freedom's Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2014), which won the Frederick Douglass Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University, as well as multiple awards from the American Historical Association.