Carlos Eire gave the world a moving and definitive look into life as an exile in his first memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, which won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2003.

Now a professor of history and religious studies at Yale University, Eire discusses the exile experience and the role that María Rosa Menocal, a Yale colleague and fellow Cuban exile, played in writing Waiting for Snow. Menocal was the wife of Library Director Crosby Kemper III, and the presentation opens the new María Rosa Menocal Lecture Series established in her memory.

The lecture series, which will extend into 2017, originally was made possible by a grant from the personal foundation of the Library director’s father, the late R. Crosby Kemper Jr.