Finding Mañana – A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus.

A thorough and exciting account of the events leading to the daring, massive exodus of more than 125,000 people from Cuba’s Mariel harbor in 1980, by Mirta Ojito.

Mirta Ojito has been a newspaper reporter for more than 17 years, first in The Miami Herald Publishing Company, where she worked in a variety of jobs for both The Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald, and, from 1996 to 2002, for The New York Times, where she covered immigration, among other beats, for the Metro Desk.

Throughout her career she has received several awards, including the American Society of Newspaper Editor’s writing award for best foreign reporting in 1999 for a series of articles about life in Cuba, and a shared Pulitzer for national reporting in 2000 for a New York Times series of articles about race in America.

Ms. Ojito has taught journalism at New York University, Columbia University and the University of Miami. She is a graduate of Florida Atlantic University and of the mid-career master’s degree program at Columbia.

Her work has been included in several anthologies including To Mend the World: Women Reflect on 9/11 (White Pine Press, 2002), Written into History: Pulitzer Prize Reporting of the Twentieth Century from The New York Times (Henry Holt and Co., 2001), By Heart/De Memoria (Temple University Press, 2003), and How Race is Lived in America (Times Books/Henry Holt and Co., 2001).

Ms. Ojito, who was born in Cuba, came to the United States in the 1980 Mariel boatlift when she was 16. Her first book, Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus, has just been published by The Penguin Press. She continues to write for The New York Times from Miami, where she lives with her husband, Arturo Villar, and their three boys.