Volar By Judith Ortiz Cofer

Judith Ortiz Cofer, a longtime resident of Georgia, was one of a number of Latina writers who rose to prominence during the 1980s and 1990s.

Her stories nigh coming-of-age experiences in Puerto Rican communities outside of New York City and her poems and essays about cultural conflicts of immigrants to the U.S. mainland made Ortiz Cofer a leading literary interpreter of the U.S.–Puerto Rican experience. In 2010 she was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.

Early on Life

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 U.s.a. in 1956 and settled in Paterson, New Bailiwick of jersey. Every bit the daughter of a frequently absent armed services father stationed at Brooklyn's Navy Chiliad and an uprooted mother nostalgic for her love isle, Ortiz Cofer spent portions of her childhood commuting betwixt Hormigueros and Paterson.

Fifty-fifty though near 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 dorsum-and-forth motion betwixt her two cultures became a vital office of her poesy and fiction. At that place 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 customs.

When she was fifteen years old, Ortiz Cofer moved with her family to Augusta, Georgia. She attended college and received an undergraduate caste in English from Augusta College (later Augusta State University). A few years subsequently she 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. By her retirement in 2013 Cofer was Regents' and Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing.

Literary Works

The author'due south first literary expressions were in poesy. I of her early chapbooks, Peregrina (1986), won the Riverstone International Chapbook Contest. Ii years later on her verse collection Terms of Survival (1987) was published, just it was not until the publication of her showtime major work of prose fiction, The Line of the Sun (1989), a novel nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, that the writer began to receive more critical attending. The Line of the Sun was too the outset of Cofer'south works to be published by the University of Georgia Press, with whom she collaborated on several afterwards publications. After this successful debut as a fiction writer, she continued to demonstrate her abilities in storytelling through short stories and personal essays. All the same, she likewise kept writing poetry, which she declared "contains the essence of language," and published ii more collections, Reaching for the Mainland (1995) and A Honey Story Beginning in Spanish (2005).

Judith Ortiz Cofer: The Physical Furnishings of Poetry

Video by Darby Carl Sanders, New Georgia Encyclopedia

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 sabbatum the states down to tell a story, we learned something from it, fifty-fifty 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 1 generation to another through fables and stories. They were pedagogy each other to cope with life in a world where women led restricted lives." Ortiz Cofer'due south 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 civilisation.

Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Babyhood (1990) is a book of memories described equally "stellar stories patterned after oral tradition." The volume besides 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 Cafeteria (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 Adult female in Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Author (2000), Ortiz Cofer continued to recall and explore through dissimilar genres the memories of her determinative years. Adult female in Front of the Sunday, which won an honour 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.South. 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 depict 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 Clan. Call Me María (2004) is a young adult novel chronicling a teenage girl'southward move from Puerto Rico to New York City. Her poignant memoirThe Cruel Country, published in 2015, recounts her return to Puerto Rico in 2011 to nurse her dying female parent. Ortiz Cofer drew from that experience a wide range of reflections on dying, death, and the grieving process, as well as on parent-kid relationships, aging, and cultural differences between the United States and Puerto Rico.

Due to a growing involvement 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 United mexican states 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'south stories are besides available in other languages.

Ortiz Cofer died on the family subcontract exterior Louisvillefrom cancer on December 30, 2016.