Judith Ortiz Cofer, a longtime resident of Georgia, was one of several Latina writers who rose to fame during the 1980s and 1990s.
his stories about coming of age experiences in puerto rican communities outside of new york city and his poems and essays about immigrant cultural conflicts in the united states. Continental made Ortiz Cofer a leading literary interpreter of the Puerto Rican-American experience. She in 2010 she was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.
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early life
ortiz cofer was born in 1952 in the small town of hormigueros, puerto rico, a semi-urban municipality in the western part of the island. his parents, fanny morot ortiz and j. meter. Ortiz Lugo came to the United States in 1956 and settled in Paterson, New Jersey. As the daughter of an oft-absent military father stationed at the Brooklyn Naval Shipyard and an uprooted mother nostalgic for her beloved island, Ortiz Cofer spent part of her childhood traveling between Anthills and Paterson.
Although most of his education was in Paterson, he lived for extended periods in his grandmother’s house in Puerto Rico and attended local schools. this movement back and forth between her two cultures became a vital part of her poetry and fiction. There is a strong island presence in her narratives, and the authenticity with which she captured island life is as powerful as her depictions of the harsh realities of the Paterson community.
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when he was fifteen, ortiz cofer moved with his family to augusta, georgia. He attended college and received a BA in English from Augusta University (later Augusta State University). A few years later he moved to Florida and received an M.A. from Florida Atlantic University. In 1984 she joined the faculty of the University of Georgia in Athens. Upon retiring in 2013, Ella Cofer was a Regents and Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing.
literary works
The first literary expressions of the author were in poetry. One of his earliest chapbooks, Peregrina (1986), won the Riverstone International Chapbook Contest. two years later his collection of poems terms of survival (1987) was published, but it was not until the publication of his first major work of prose fiction, la linea del sol. (1989), a Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel, that the author was beginning to receive more critical attention. The Line of the Sun was also the first of Cofer’s works to be published by the University of Georgia Press, with whom he collaborated on several subsequent publications. Following this successful debut of hers as a fiction writer, she continued to demonstrate her storytelling skills through short stories and personal essays. however, she also continued to write poetry, which according to her “contains the essence of language”, and published two more collections, reaching the mainland (1995) and a love story that begins in Spanish (2005).
ortiz cofer claimed to have inherited the art of storytelling from her abuelita (“grandmother”), a fact that is suggested by the powerful attributes of the grandmother character that appears in the line de la sol and many of his other narratives. “When my grandmother sat us down to tell us a story, we learned something from her, although we always laughed. that was her way of teaching her. From an early age I knew instinctively that storytelling was a form of empowerment, that the women in my family were passing power from one generation to another through fables and stories. They were teaching each other how to cope with life in a world where women led restricted lives.” Ortiz Cofer’s most powerful characters are Puerto Rican women trying to break restrictive cultural and social conventions or developing survival strategies to deal with sexism in their own culture.
Silent Dance: A Partial Memory of a Puerto Rican Childhood (1990) is a memoir described as “stellar stories modeled after oral tradition.” the volume also includes poems that highlight the main themes of the narratives. silent dancing received the pen/martha albrand nonfiction special mention in 1991 and received a pushcart award. it was followed by the latin deli (1993), a combination of poetry, short fiction, and personal narrative. in these collections, as in his following volumes, an island like you (1995), the year of our revolution (1998), and woman facing the sun : upon becoming a writer (2000), ortiz cofer continued to recall and explore the memories of her formative years through different genres. Woman Facing the Sun, which won an award from the Georgia Writers Association, provides invaluable insight into the author’s inner world, what motivated her writing, and where she stood in mainstream terms. main american and us. Latin literature. her novel the meaning of consolation (2003) explores language and communication: the communication between the title character and her schizophrenic sister, male and female, English and Spanish.
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many of ortiz cofer’s stories, poems, and personal essays describe the lives of young puerto ricans straddling the puerto rican culture of their parents and a continental culture consumed by its own prejudices, while asserting their own dignity and creative potential. An Island Like You received the 1995 Reforma Pura Belpré Medal and was listed among the best books for young adults by the American Library Association. Call me Maria (2004) is a novel for young adults that follows the move of a teenage girl from Puerto Rico to New York City. Ella’s moving memoir El País Cruel, published in 2015, recounts her return to Puerto Rico in 2011 to care for her dying mother. Ortiz Cofer drew from that experience a wide range of reflections on dying, death, and the grieving process, as well as on the relationships between parents and children, aging, and the cultural differences between the United States and Puerto Rico.
due to the growing interest in his work in puerto rico and other spanish-speaking countries, the university of puerto rico published la linea del sol (1996), a spanish translation of his acclaimed novel the line of the sun. The Economic Culture Fund in Mexico published An Island Like You (1997), a translation of An Island Like You. the same year, public art published dancing in silence: scenes from a puerto rican childhood (1997), a translation of silent dancing. Several of the author’s stories are also available in other languages.
Ortiz Cofer died of cancer at the family farm outside of Louisville on December 30, 2016.
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