Ortiz Cofer was born in 1952 in the small town of Hormigueros, Puerto Rico, a semiurban municipality in the western part of the island. Her parents, Fanny Morot Ortiz and J. M. Ortiz Lugo, came to the United States in 1956 and settled in Paterson, New Jersey. As the daughter of a frequently absent military father stationed at Brooklyn’s Navy Yard and an uprooted mother nostalgic for her beloved island, Ortiz Cofer spent portions of her childhood commuting between Hormigueros and Paterson.
Even though most of her schooling was in Paterson, she lived for extended periods at her grandmother’s house in Puerto Rico and attended the local schools. This back-and-forth movement 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 life on the island is as powerful as her descriptions of the harsh realities of the Paterson community (Edna Acosta-Belen, State University of New York, Albany, New Encyclopedia of Georgia).
At the age of fifteen in 1967, Judith moved with her family to Augusta, Georgia, where she graduated from Butler High School and subsequently attended Augusta College.
In 1971, Judith Ortiz married John Cofer, whom she met while attending Augusta College. They both graduated in 1974, Judith obtaining her Bachelor's degree in English. By 1977, Cofer had completed her Master's degree in English at Florida Atlantic University and spent the summer studying at Oxford University with a scholarship from the English Speaking Union.
Between 1978 and 1980, Cofer worked as an adjunct instructor of English Literature and Spanish Language at both Broward County Community College and Palm Beach Community College. From 1980 to 1984, she was an English lecturer at the University of Miami, Coral Gables. Cofer then secured a position at the University of Georgia as an English instructor (1984-1987). At that time, she left UGA and began work at the Georgia Center for Continuing Education (1987-1989), Macon College as an English instructor (1989-1990), and then Mercer University as a special programs coordinator (1990-1992). In 1992, she returned to the University of Georgia as a tenure track associate professor of creative writing. She was then appointed a Regent's Professor and a Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing.
Though Judith Ortiz Cofer worked as a free-lance journalist and had many short stories and poems published in various weekly and daily publications, her literary career began around the age of twenty-eight with the publication of her first book of poetry entitled Latin Women Pray. She published a wide variety of works including short stories, novels for children and young adults, poetry collections, autobiographical reflections, and essays. Notably, The Line of the Sun (1989) and The Latin Deli (1993) both received nominations for the Pulitzer Prize.
In 2010, Judith Ortiz Cofer was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. Cofer taught at the University of Georgia, until her retirement in 2013, at which time she moved to her family farm in Louisville, Georgia. Judith Ortiz Cofer passed away on December 30, 2016. (Judith Ortiz Cofer Collection, Hargrett Library, UGA).
*Image Courtesy of George P. Butler High School, Augusta, GA, Candela 1970.
The author’s first literary expressions were in poetry. One of her early chapbooks, Peregrina (1986), won the Riverstone International Chapbook Competition. Two years later her poetry collection Terms of Survival (1987) was published, but it was not until the publication of her first major work of prose fiction, The Line of the Sun (1989), a novel nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, that the author began 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 she collaborated on several later publications. After this successful debut as a fiction writer, she continued to demonstrate her abilities in storytelling through short stories and personal essays. However, she also kept writing poetry, which she declared “contains the essence of language,” and published two more collections, Reaching for the Mainland (1995) and A Love Story Beginning in Spanish (2005).
Ortiz Cofer claimed to have inherited the art of storytelling from her abuelita (“grandmother”), a fact suggested in the powerful attributes of the grandmother character who appears in The Line of the Sun and many of her other narratives. “When my abuela sat us down to tell a story, we learned something from it, even though we always laughed. That was her way of teaching. So early on I instinctively knew storytelling was a form of empowerment, that the women in my family were passing on power from one generation to another through fables and stories. They were teaching each other to cope with life in a world where women led restricted lives.” Ortiz Cofer’s most powerful characters are Puerto Rican women who try to break away from restrictive cultural and social conventions or who develop survival strategies to deal with the sexism in their own culture.
Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood (1990) is a book of memories described as “stellar stories patterned after oral tradition.” The volume also includes poems that highlight the narratives’ major themes. Silent Dancing received the 1991 PEN/Martha Albrand Special Citation in Nonfiction and was awarded a Pushcart Prize. It was followed by The Latin Deli (1993), a combination of poetry, short fiction, and personal narrative. In these collections, as in her subsequent volumes, An Island Like You (1995), The Year of Our Revolution (1998), and Woman in Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer (2000), Ortiz Cofer continued to recall and explore through different genres the memories of her formative years. Woman in Front of the Sun, which won an award from the Georgia Writers Association, provides invaluable insights into the inner world of the author, what motivated her writing and where she placed herself in terms of the American mainstream and U.S. Latino literature. Her novel The Meaning of Consuelo (2003) explores language and communication: communication between the title character and her schizophrenic sister, men and women, English and Spanish.
Many of Ortiz Cofer’s stories, poems, and personal essays describe the lives of Puerto Rican youths straddling the Puerto Rican culture of their parents and a mainland 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 María (2004) is a young adult novel chronicling a teenage girl’s move from Puerto Rico to New York City. Her poignant memoir The Cruel Country, published in 2015, recounts her return to Puerto Rico in 2011 to nurse 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 parent-child relationships, aging, and cultural differences between the United States and Puerto Rico.
Due to a growing interest in her work in Puerto Rico and in other Spanish-speaking countries, the University of Puerto Rico published La linea del sol (1996), a Spanish translation of her acclaimed novel The Line of the Sun. The Fondo del Cultura Económica in Mexico published Una isla como tú (1997), a translation of An Island Like You. The same year Arte Público Press released Bailando en silencio: Escenas de una niñez puertorriqueña (1997), a translation of Silent Dancing. Several of the author’s stories are also available in other languages.
Ortiz Cofer died on the family farm outside Louisville from cancer on December 30, 2016.
Obituary from Augusta Chronicle.