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© Juanita Ceballos

Mirta Ojito

Mirta Ojito was born in Havana, Cuba, and came to the United States in 1980 in the Mariel boatlift. She has received the American Society of Newspaper Editors' Award for best foreign reporting, and she shared the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, for her contribution to the series "How Race Is Lived in America." Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including Written into History: Pulitzer Prize Reporting of the Twentieth Century from The New York Times, edited by Anthony Lewis. Ojito has taught journalism at New York University, Columbia University, and the University of Miami. She writes for The New York Times from Miami.
Finding Manana

Books

Finding Manana

What Students Will Be Reading: Campus Common Reading Roundup, 2025-26

With the fall semester in full swing, colleges and universities around the country have announced their Common Reading books for the upcoming 2025-26 academic year. We’ve compiled a list of over 286 programs and their title selections from publicly available sources, which you can download here: First-Year Reading 2025-26. We will continue to update this

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Register for the 2026 Penguin Random House First-Year Experience® Conference Author Events!

Penguin Random House Author Events at the 45th Annual First-Year Experience® Conference February 15-18, 2026 Seattle, Washington Hyatt Regency Seattle Click Here to RSVP A complimentary meal and a limited number of books will be available to attendees. Each event will also be followed by an author signing. Interested in hosting one of these authors at

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2026 Catalog for First-Year & Common Reading

We are delighted to present our new First-Year & Common Reading Catalog for 2026! From award-winning fiction, poetry, memoir, and biography to new books about the environment, current events, history, public health, science, social justice, student success, and technology, the titles presented in our common reading catalog will have students not only eagerly flipping through

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