Judith Ortiz Cofer

• Born: February 24, 1952
• Birthplace: Hormigueros, Puerto Rico
• Died: December 30, 2016
• Place of death: Louisville, Georgia

Author Profile

Judith Ortiz Cofer was born in Puerto Rico and moved with her family to the United States as a young girl, though they frequently returned to Puerto Rico to visit her extended family. She did not begin writing for publication until after she had been in the United States for more than twenty years. Her writing was informed by her bicultural experiences: one in the urban apartment buildings in English-speaking New Jersey, where her father stressed the importance of learning American language and customs to succeed, and the other in the traditional island community where her mother and other Spanish-speaking relatives taught her not to forget her heritage.

Ortiz Cofer was bilingual, but she writes primarily in English with a peppering of Spanish words and phrases. For example, her grandmother’s home, filled with the community of women who nurtured Ortiz Cofer as a child, is warmly referred to as la casa de Mamá or simply her casa. Neither solely Puerto Rican nor simply American, Ortiz Cofer straddled both cultures and intermingled them in her writing. Although much of her life was spent in New Jersey—where her father was stationed in the Navy—and later Florida and Georgia, she considered herself a Puerto Rican woman. She identified this connection to the island not merely through geographical association but also by invoking and reclaiming her family, their stories, and her memories through her writing on the Puerto Rican immigrant experience.

As a Puerto Rican woman, Ortiz Cofer was expected to marry, bear children, and define herself through these relationships. She dreamed, however, of becoming a teacher and later a writer. Although she was married to Charles John Cofer in 1971 and later gave birth to a daughter, Tanya, she did not follow the traditional Puerto Rican path of the married woman. After completing a bachelor’s degree in 1974 at Augusta College, she earned a master’s degree in English from Florida Atlantic University and received a fellowship to do graduate work at Oxford University in 1977. She taught English and creative writing at various schools in Florida before publishing her first poetry collection, Latin Women Pray, in 1980. She then worked at the University of Miami and studied at the Bead Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont before settling as an English professor at the University of Georgia in 1984. In addition to her academic career, she also gradually became a widely anthologized and acclaimed writer. Her other early publications include the poetry collections Peregrina (1986) and Terms of Survival (1897) as well as the essay "Reaching for the Mainland" (1987).

In 1988 Ortiz Cofer was recognized with the Witter Brynner Foundation Award for Poetry, and the next year she received National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. This led her to write the autobiographical novel The Line of the Sun (1989), which would be nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and a collection of stories and essays, Silent Dancing (1990), from which the story "More Room" won the Pushcart Prize. She was nominated for another Pulitzer for the collection The Latin Deli (1993). The collection's title story, "The Latin Deli," won an O. Henry Prize. Ortiz Cofer’s writing paid homage to the strictly defined and highly ritualized lives of Puerto Rican women, but her life and her act of writing break that mold; she redefined what it means to be a Puerto Rican woman. Some of her significant later works are the memoir, The Cruel Country, the poetry collection A Love Story Beginning in Spanish (2005), the young-adult novel Call Me Maria (2006), the novel The Meaning of Consuelo (2003) and the 2000 essay collection, Woman in Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer. She became a tenured professor at the University of Georgia in 1992, where she taught until her retirement in 2013. Shortly after her retirement, she was diagnosed with cancer, but still maintained speaking engagements. In 2010 she was accepted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, and has received numerous other honors and awards in her distinguished career.

Judith Ortiz Cofer passed away at home in Louisville, Georgia, on December 30, 2016. She was survived by her husband and daughter.

Bibliography

Acosta-Belén, Edna. “A MELUS Interview: Judith Ortiz Cofer.” MELUS 18. 3 (1993): 83–97. Print

Bost, Suzanne. “Transgressing Borders: Puerto Rican and Latina Mestizaje.” MELUS 25.2 (2000): 187–211. Print.

Fahmy, Sam. "Noted Author Judith Ortiz Cofer Receives SEC Faculty Achievment Award." UGA Today. U of Georgia Office of Public Affairs, 20 Apr. 2013. Web. 25 Mar. 2015.

Faymonville, Carment. “New Transnational Identities in Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Autobiographical Fiction.” MELUS 26.2 (2001): 129–158. Print.

Kanellos, Nicolas, ed. The Hispanic American Almanac: A Reference Work on Hispanics in the United States. 3d ed. Detroit: Gale, 1993. Print.

"Judith Ortiz Cofer 1952–2016." Poetry Foundation, 2017,www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/judith-ortiz-cofer. Accessed 2 Feb. 2017.

Ortiz Cofer, Judith “Puerto Rican Literature in Georgia? An Interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer.” Interview by Rafael Ocasio. The Kenyon Review 14.4 (1992): 43–50. Print.