The Big Read 2025: Writing Home: Telling Stories with Heart: A Creative Writing Workshop with Ruth Behar

Sunday, October 12, 2025 / 12-2 p.m.
Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU (301 Washington Avenue, Miami Beach)

Free, RSVP required.

In this workshop we will learn how to write about family, tradition, leaving and finding home. All of us have heard stories about where our ancestors lived and how they and their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren have found a sense of belonging in Florida and elsewhere. Drawing on those stories, we will discuss how to write about home with heart. And we will explore how to mix true stories with fictional stories to create a story filled with wonder. Come prepared with a family story you’d like to write about. And if you like to draw, also bring a photo or family heirloom that can inspire you as an illustrator.

Open to all ages. Copies of Ruth Behar’s books will be available for sale to attendees.

For questions, contact: Molly Sepsenwol at msepsenw@mdc.edu.

This workshop is presented as part of the 2025 NEA Big Read Miami in partnership with the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU.

RUTH BEHAR is the Pura Belpré Award-winning author of Lucky Broken Girl, the Newbery Honor Award-winning author of Across So Many Seas, a Kirkus Best Middle Grade author for Letters from Cuba, and a School Library Journal Best Picture Book author for Tía Fortuna’s New Home, as well as co-author with her son, Gabriel Frye-Behar, of the picture book Pepita Meets Bebita. She was born in Havana, grew up in New York, and has lived in Spain and Mexico. Her work also includes poetry, memoir, and the acclaimed travel books An Island Called Home and Traveling Heavy. She was the first Latina to win a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” and her other honors include a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and being named a “Great Immigrant” by the Carnegie Corporation. She is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan and lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

NEA Big Read is a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest.

El proyecto NEA Big Read es una iniciativa del National Endowment for the Arts (el Fondo Nacional para las Artes de Estados Unidos) en cooperación con Arts Midwest.