Professor Lillian Guerra is the author of many scholarly articles and essays as well as five books of history: Popular Expression and National Identity in Puerto Rico (University Press of Florida, 1998), The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba (University of North Carolina Press, 2005), and Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption and Resistance, 1959-1971 (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), which received the 2014 Bryce Wood Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association, its most prestigious prize for a book on Latin America across all fields. Dr. Guerra’s fourth book, published by Yale University Press in 2018, is titled Heroes, Martyrs and Political Messiahs in Revolutionary Cuba, 1946-1958.
In 2023, Professor Guerra published Patriots and Traitors in Revolutionary Cuba, 1961-1981, the third of her "trilogy" on the Cuban Revolution.
Guerra's has published works of public history and analyses of contemporary Cuba in media such as the New York Times, Newsweek, Mexico's prestigious Letras Libres as well as several books of photography, including The Idea of Cuba by Pulitzer-prize-winning photographer Alex Harris. Her creative writings include three collections of Spanish-language poetry, published in Ecuador, Cuba and Spain as well as a book of Spanish-language short stories, titled Cartografía Corporal, published by Editorial Verbum in 2014.
In January 2023, Professor Guerra launched a bilingual Cuban Studies website at the University of Florida that explores the complex realities and history of Cuba with new material every month of the academic year, from September to May: https://cubanstudies.history.ufl.edu/
The website features interviews with the world's leading scholars of Cuba, an on-line museum of photographs Guerra took over the course of nearly thirty years of researching in Cuba, a podcast of author's book readings and lectures on Cuban archives at UF as well as a diverse array of objects and documents called "Gems of the Archive".
Guerra’s scholarship has earned her many awards, including the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. Born in New York to Cuban exiles and raised in Marion, Kansas and Miami, Florida, Professor Guerra has taught Latin American and Caribbean history for twenty-four years at Bates College, Yale University and currently, the University of Florida.