Judith Ortiz Cofer (1952-) Biography

Born 1952, in Hormigueros, Puerto Rico; immigrated to United States, 1956; Ethnicity: "Puerto Rican" Education: Augusta College, B.A., 1974; Florida Atlantic University, M.A., 1977; attended Oxford University, 1977.

Addresses

Office—Mercer University College, Forsyth, GA 31029. Agent—Berenice Hoffman Literary Agency, 215 West 75th St., New York, NY 10023.

Career

Bilingual teacher at public schools in Palm Beach County, FL, 1974–75; Broward Community College, Fort Lauderdale, FL, adjunct instructor in English, 1978–80, instructor in Spanish, 1979; University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, lecturer in English, 1980–84; University of Georgia, Athens, instructor in English, 1984–87, Georgia Center for Continuing Education, instructor in English, 1987–88; Macon College, instructor in English, 1988–89; Mercer University College, Forsyth, GA, special programs coordinator, 1990; University of Georgia, professor of English and creative writing, 1994–. Adjunct instructor at Palm Beach Junior College, 1978–80; visiting professor Vanderbilt University; Rockefeller Foundation residency in Italy, 1999. Conducts poetry workshops and gives poetry readings. Member of regular staff of International Conference on the Fantastic in Literature, 1979–82; member of literature panel of Fine Arts Council of Florida, 1982; member of administrative staff of Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, 1983, 1984.

Member

Poetry Society of America, Poets and Writers, Associated Writing Programs.

Honors Awards

Scholar of English-speaking Union at Oxford University, 1977; fellow of Fine Arts Council of Florida, 1980; Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, scholar, 1981, John Atherton Scholar in Poetry, 1982; grant from Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, 1988, for Letters from a Caribbean Island; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry, 1989; nominee, Pulitzer Prize, 1990, for The Line of the Sun; PEN/Martha Albrand Special Citation, for Silent Dancing; Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, for The Latin Deli; O. Henry Award, 1994, for "Nada"; Best Book citation, American Library Association (ALA), and Pura Belpre medal, REFORM/ALA, both 1996, both for An Island like You: Stories of the Barrio; Chris-Janer Award in Creative Research, University of Georgia, 1998; Americas Award for Children's and Young-Adult Literature, National Consortium of Latin-American Studies Programs, 2003, and Books for the Teen Age citation, New York Public Library, 2004, both for The Meaning of Consuelo; Pushcart Prize; Americas Award honorable mention, National Consortium of Latin-American Studies Programs, 2005, for Call Me Maria; Georgia Top Twenty-five Reading List includee, 2005, for The Latin Deli.

Writings

Latin Women Pray (chapbook), Florida Arts Gazette Press, 1980.

The Native Dancer (chapbook), Pteranodon Press, 1981.

Among the Ancestors (chapbook), Louisville News Press, 1981.

Latin Women Pray (three-act play), first produced in Atlanta, GA, 1984.

Peregrina (poems), Riverstone Press (Golden, CO), 1986.

Terms of Survival (poems), Arte Publico (Houston, TX), 1987.

The Line of the Sun (novel), University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1989.

Silent Dancing (personal essays), Arte Publico (Houston, TX), 1990.

The Latin Deli: Prose and Poetry, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1993.

An Island like You: Stories of the Barrio, Orchard (New York, NY), 1995.

Reaching for the Mainland, and Selected New Poems, Bilingual Press (Tempe, AZ), 1995.

The Year of Our Revolution: Selected and New Stories and Poems, Piñata Books (Houston, TX), 1998.

Sleeping with One Eye Open: Women Writers and the Art of Survival, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1999.

Woman in Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 2000.

(Editor and author of introduction) Riding Low on the Streets of Gold: Latino Literature for Young Adults, Piñata Books (Houston, TX), 2002.

The Meaning of Consuelo (novel), Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York, NY), 2003.

Call Me Maria (novel), Orchard (New York, NY), 2004.

A Love Story Beginning in Spanish: Poems, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 2005.

Contributor to anthologies, including Triple Crown: Chicano, Puerto Rican and Cuban American Poetry a trilogy that contains Ortiz Cofer's poetry collection Reaching for the Mainland, Bilingual Press, 1987.

Several of Cofer's books have been translated into Spanish.

Sidelights

"People ask me: If I am a Puerto Rican writer, why don't I write in Spanish?" noted poet, essayist, and author Judith Ortiz Cofer in the online publication, The Global Education Project. "Isn't writing in English a sellout? I respond that English is my literary language. The language of the country my parents brought me to. Spanish is my familial language, that lies between the lines of my English language. Because I am a daughter of the Puerto Rican diaspora, English gives life to my writing."

Such bilingual concerns are part of the territory for Cofer, born in Puerto Rico and raised in the United States. A member of the Puerto Rican "diaspora," she however differs from other well-known writers of that experience in that she is a woman writing in standard American English, and she writes not of immigrant life in New York, but of life on the home island and in Paterson, New Jersey, where Cofer herself grew up. Roberto Marquez, writing in a New York Times Book Review article on Cofer's The Line of the Sun, declared that this "first novel confirms the continuing efflorescence and enlarges the resonance and reach of this [immigrant] literature." In her first novel, as well as in her collections of poetry and prose for adults such as Silent Dancing and The Latin Deli, and in collections intended for the young adult market, An Island like You and The Year of Our Revolution, Cofer has made the bi-cultural experience understandable and approachable.

Born in Puerto Rico in 1952, Cofer was brought to the United States at the age of two. Her mother and father married as teenagers, and her father was stationed with the military in Panama when Cofer was born. "He didn't come back home until I was two years old, and I had to get used to him at that time," Cofer told Rafael Ocasio in an interview for Americas Review. Out of the army, her father tried to make a go of it in civilian life, but for financial reasons he rejoined the armed forces, this time in the U.S. Navy. "That's when our back-and-forth travels began," Cofer told Ocasio. The family moved to Paterson, New Jersey, but continued to migrate back and forth between there and Puerto Rico every six months when her father sailed with the cargo fleet to Europe. They would stay with Cofer's maternal grandmother when in Puerto Rico, and it was during these periods that Cofer internalized the life, language, and culture of her homeland.

"Spanish was my home language, and it still is my family language, but that vocabulary has to do mainly with family matters," Cofer told Ocasio in her interview. Though she sometimes still dreams in Spanish, her broader linguistic experience is in the language of her adopted country: American English. Those years of traveling back and forth between Paterson and Puerto Rico provided Cofer with a fund of stories and experiences she still draws upon. The contrast between America and her native island was sharp and deep—from the urban environment of Paterson to the rural and tradition-bound life in the village in Puerto Rico.

"The main contrast had to do, of course, with culture and language, as well as climate," Cofer told Ocasio. Her mother felt more secure on the island, for she could communicate better and was more at home in the small town environment provided there: "The shifts were abrupt and always traumatic, going back and forth." On the island, the children attended Catholic school taught by American nuns so that they would keep up their English skills. Cofer was the eternal new kid at school with these semi-annual moves. In the midst of such constant moving, she found one constant: books. The Paterson Public Library became her refuge in North America, and one year she went right through the entire fairy and folktale section, discovering that the Cinderella story was extant in cultures from Scandinavia to Africa.

"I think that I educated myself from the oral traditions of my grandmother's house and from all of those folktales and fairy tales that I absorbed growing up," Cofer noted. In The Global Education Project Cofer wrote of these early years that "I absorbed literature, both spoken cuentos and books, as a creature who breathed ink. Each writer provided poems, novels, taught me that language could be tamed. I realized that I could make it perform. I had to believe the work was important to my being: To use my art as a bridge between my cultures. Unlike my parents, I was not always straddling. I began crossing the bridge, traveling back and forth without fear and confusion."

Like her parents, Cofer married young, at age nineteen, then went on to earn an M.A. at Florida Atlantic University and attend Oxford University in 1977. During her postgraduate years she also was a bilingual teacher in the Florida public schools, as well as an adjunct professor and lecturer in English at the University of Miami. Moving to Georgia, Cofer became a professor at the University of Georgia and set up home in Louisville, Georgia, with her husband and daughter. Her move to the South gave Cofer a further take on the multicultural experience, yet often confuses critics. As she noted in The Global Education Project, people often ask her what she is doing in the South when the barrio is her proper subject. "My isolation from others, my living and teaching in the piney woods of Georgia has not dissipated my passion," she commented. "I write anywhere I can find 'a room of my own.' My psyche is that of 'immigrant writer.'"

"In an extended family, the family story, gossip, or myth becomes something that is repeated so often and used in so many ways to teach lessons or to make a point that I couldn't help but be trained in that as I grew up," Cofer told Ocasio in Americas Review.

"When I became a writer [the oral tradition] became such a natural form of communication for me." Cofer's first literary efforts were in poetry, a form she still writes in. "Nothing contains the truth I know like poetry," Cofer wrote in The Global Education Project. "A poem is a sacred thing in that it connects a person in a very real way not through magic, but in a very natural process of association and chemistry to the unconscious." Early chapbooks led to her first volumes of poetry, Peregrina, Terms of Survival, and Reaching for the Mainland. Present in these poems already was the theme of a life in two worlds, of the immigrant experience. Of Reaching for the Mainland, a critic in Library Journal commented that "Cofer's warm, intimate use of language is always inviting and appealing." As a poet, Cofer has earned honors and critical acclaim.

In 1989, Cofer published The Line of the Sun, the first novel ever published by the University of Georgia Press. A Pulitzer Prize nominee, The Line of the Sun tells the story of a wild young boy born in the village of Salud, Puerto Rico. Guzman is ungovernable as a child, and even worse as a young man. He falls in love with the village prostitute and soothsayer, La Cabra, a woman twice his age. Ultimately he flees the island for New York, and is not heard of again for fifteen years. In the meantime, Guzman's sister marries his best friend and the family moves to Paterson, New Jersey, taking up residence there in a Puerto Rican community, in El Building, along with their daughter and son. Marisol, the daughter, is thirteen, and has always been attracted to the myth of her lost uncle Guzman. When he shows up one Christmas Eve, she becomes his closest attendant, nursing him when he is stabbed, spying for him, even enabling him at the end of the story to play the part of the mythic hero he has always desired.

Narrated by Marisol, The Line of the Sun, is told in two parts: Marisol's mythic tales of the Salud, the Puerto Rican village she left when a baby, and, the more realistic present of Paterson, New Jersey. "Cofer is a poet," noted Sonja Bolle in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, "and in her descriptions of the small town, her eye for detail brings alive the stifling and magical world of village life" Bolle concluded that the "lasting impression from Cofer's novel is the gulf that separates poverty-stricken life on the island and the trapped, tenement life on the Mainland." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly concluded that the novel "paints a colorful, revealing portrait of Puerto Rican culture and domestic relationships." Writing in Wilson Library Bulletin, Ellen Donohue Warwick called The Line of the Sun a "fine first novel" and noted also that "Much of the book's appeal springs from the choice of Marisol as narrator." Starr E. Smith observed in Library Journal that the "U.S. immigrant experience" is flavored with "a hint of magical realism" in Cofer's novel, and lauded the author's "well-realized characters and vibrant depictions of Puerto Rican folk culture." In a review for the New York Times Book Review, Marquez called Cofer "a prose writer of evocatively lyric authority, a novelist of historical compass and sensitivity," and one "from whom we may well look forward to hearing more."

If Cofer weaves her Puerto Rican and New Jersey roots into fictional prose in her first novel, her next book, a collection of poetry and essays, deals with this same experience more directly as autobiography. Silent Dancing "bridges the gap between autobiography and fiction" and between memories and social commentary, noted a reviewer for Publishers Weekly. In this book Cofer deals with her early years, shuttling back and forth between Puerto Rico and the high-rise life of urban New Jersey. Cofer "recovers the warp and weft of her experience in stellar stories," a Publishers Weekly reviewer concluded. Writing in Library Journal, Mary Margaret Benson observed that these "eminently readable memoirs are a delightful introduction to Puerto Rican culture." In this book, Cofer first experiments with combining essays and poems, her essays inspired by and also providing background to her verse.

The Latin Deli was described as "a delicious smorgasbord of the sights, smells, tastes, and sounds recalled from a cross-cultural girlhood," by Booklist contributor Whitney Scott. In this collection of poetry and short stories, Cofer presents universal coming-of-age concerns as well as young protagonists alternately baffled by prejudice against Hispanics by both blacks and whites and consumed by the battle between flesh and spirit as played out within the Roman Catholic faith. A critic for Kirkus Reviews deemed the collection a "compassionate, delicate rendering of Puerto Rican life in America." Cofer places her stories in a simulation of the barrio tenement, El Building, where she grew up in Paterson and where "the joys and tragedies of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood unfold," according to the Kirkus Reviews critic. Stories deal with real pain, as well, as in "Nada," in which a mother loses her only son in Vietnam not long after the death of her husband, and is driven to suicide. "Nada" won the prestigious O. Henry Award in 1994 and the entire collection received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for its celebration of diversity.

"I believe there are many paths for my creative drive to take," Cofer told Ocasio in Americas Review. One of those paths emerged in the mid-1990s when she realized that many of her stories were being anthologized for high school students; that her stories, poems, and essays spoke to that readership as directly as they do to older readers. Working with an editor at Orchard Books, Cofer penned a series of short stories featuring teens living in a multicultural world. The twelve stories in An Island like You: Stories of the Barrio are set in and around Paterson's Puerto Rican barrio, El Building, and are told "with sensitivity, insight, and humor," according to Lauren Mayer in School Library Journal. Mayer concluded that the stories are compelling because their teen protagonists "are doubly caught between two worlds—not only between childhood and adulthood, but also between their parents' culture and heritage and their own" In Booklist Hazel Rochman noted that Cofer's characters' voices are "funny, weary, and irreverent," and that the author "depicts a diverse neighborhood that's warm, vital, and nurturing, and that can be hell if you don't fit in."

Different teens are the focus in each of the linked tales: Yolanda watches her mom stumble toward a new relationship in "Don José of La Mancha" and then appears again in "The One Who Watches" as a shoplifting friend of the narrator, Doris. A reviewer in Publishers Weekly commented that the theme representing a "struggle to transcend one's roots but never succeeding (nor really wanting to)—is explored with enormous humanity and humor." The same reviewer predicted that this "fine collection" will help shed light on an "underserved" young-adult group. In a Horn Book review, Rudine Sims Bishop observed that the collection "benefits from the consistency of quality that comes from a single talented writer" and went on to note that "Cofer's writing is lively, and the characters memorable…. The characters, their voices, and their experiences will seem famil-Consuelo Signe, the more serious-minded sister in a close-knit Puerto Rican family, slowly realizes that her pretty, vivacious younger sister Mili has a serious problem that other family members refuse to acknowledge. (Cover designed by Bob Kosturko.)iar to many adolescents." Concluding the review, Bishop wrote, "I hope Cofer continues to write for young people."

Cofer has indeed continued writing for a young-adult audience, publishing a second collection of stories and poems, The Year of Our Revolution, in 1998. These stories focus on growing up during the turbulent 1960s and once again are set in the Paterson barrio. Most are narrated in hindsight by Mary Ellen, also known as Maria Elenita. "Caught between Hispanic and American lifestyles, and eager to break free of traditional Hispanic values, Mary Ellen is strongly attracted to things that are alien to her parents," observed a reviewer for Publishers Weekly. The same reviewer went on to note that "Cofer's lyrical descriptions of how music and the Vietnam War fired Mary Ellen's youthful passions are affecting," and concluded that, "for mature teenagers, there is wisdom aplenty in this radiant collection." Focusing on the verse included in the collection, Booklist critic Debbie Carton wrote that the "poems highlight the conflicts, principles, and themes" of Cofer's stories. Carton concluded that The Year of Our Revolution serves as a valuable "resource" for studies about ethnicity and an invaluable reading experience for teens "able to savor" the author's "use of language."

Taking place during the 1950s, The Meaning of Consuelo finds the title character dealing with a father who loves America, a mother who loves traditional island life, and a sister who is developing a worsening case of schizophrenia. Eventually, Consuelo follows her gay cousin Patricio, the only person in Puerto Rico who seems to understand her, after he travels to New York. In the story, which is suitable for older teens, Cofer balances the various pulls on her heroine; according to a Kirkus Reviews contributor, "We understand Consuelo's abiding love for her homeland as well as her need to get away." Donna Seaman, writing in Booklist, noted that The Meaning of Consuelo "combines the timeless clarity and moral imperative of folktales with the timely wit of keen social criticism." Mary Margaret Benson, writing for Library Journal, noted that the author's "descriptions of her native Puerto Rico are rich and layered," while School Library Journal reviewer Kathleen T. Isaacs dubbed the novel "a literary delight."

In an effort to bring more Latino literature to young adults, Cofer has edited a collection of new and well-known authors titled Riding Low on the Streets of Gold. The anthology includes eleven poems and twelve short stories from established writer such as Pat Mora and José Marti, as well as newer authors like Mike Padilla. Although the book does contain some gritty language, many of the stories and poems serve as effective vehicles to begin classroom discussion, according to Linda L. Plevak in School Library Journal. Plevak deemed the book a "solid introduction to Latino literature," while Henry Berry, writing in Reviewer's Bookwatch, maintained that the audience need not be limited to
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teens, calling the book "a fine anthology in its field for readers of any age."

Call Me Maria is a novel for younger teen readers; Maria is a thirteen-year-old Puerto Rican girl who chooses to move from the island with her father to New York. Eventually, Maria realizes that her mother will not come to live with them in their new country, and she struggles to figure out whether she is an island girl or a barrio girl, wondering why she cannot be both. Maria is an aspiring writer, and several of her poems and letters are included in the novel; a Kirkus Reviews contributor commented on the "affecting mix of poetry and prose" found in the novel. Carol A. Edwards, writing for School Library Journal, considered the book "understated but with a brilliant combination of all the right words to convey events." Maria eventually becomes familiar with three languages: English, Spanish, and Spanglish, and Cofer "weaves them together in verse and poetic prose that is authentically adolescent."

Cofer maintains that the act of writing helps to bind her past with her present; essays, short stories, and especially poetry strengthen her ties to her island roots even as she goes about her life as a college professor in the United States. Her book Woman in Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer is an autobiographical collection of essays and poetry that follows the process by which she developed her craft as a writer. "Cofer writes with conviction and power, encouraging all whom aspire to writing … to pursue their dream," praised Nancy R. Ives in a review of the book for Library Journal. "I would say that ninety per cent of what I write is about being Puerto Rican," the author admitted to Ocasio, "even though I live in rural Georgia, my husband is North American and my daughter was born here…. You sit down at a table and call back the spirits of your ancestors. Poetry is my emotional and intellectual connection to my heritage."