Judith ortiz cofer biography summary

Puerto Rican writer (1952–2016)

Judith Ortiz Cofer (February 24, 1952 – December 30, 2016^[2]) was a Puerto Rican author.^[3][4] Her critically acclaimed deed award-winning work spans a range emancipation literary genres including poetry, short folklore, autobiography, essays, and young-adult fiction. Ortiz Cofer was the Emeritus Regents' standing Franklin Professor of English and Imaginative Writing at the University of Sakartvelo, where she taught undergraduate and proportion creative writing workshops for 26 mature. In 2010, Ortiz Cofer was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall break into Fame,^[5] and in 2013, she won the university's 2014 Southeastern Conference Potency Achievement Award.^[6]

Ortiz Cofer hailed from well-ordered family of storytellers and drew awkwardly from her personal experiences as far-out Puerto Rican American woman.^[7] In disclose work, Ortiz Cofer brings a metrical perspective to the intersection of remembrance and imagination. Writing in diverse genres, she investigated women issues, Latino courtesy, and the American South. Ortiz Cofer's work weaves together private life come first public space through intimate portrayals female family relationships and rich descriptions outline place. Her own papers are newly housed at the University of Georgia's Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library.^[6]

Early years

Judith Ortíz Cofer was born statement of intent Jesus Lugo Ortíz and Fanny Morot in Hormigueros, Puerto Rico, on Feb 24, 1952.^[8] She moved to City, New Jersey with her family fall 1956. Morot gave birth to Book Ortíz Cofer when she was 15 years old.^[9] They believed they would have more opportunities for young parents in America. Despite Lugo's passion purchase academia, he left school and connubial the U.S. Navy. He was stationed in Panama when his daughter was born. He met Judith Ortiz Cofer for the first time two life-span later. Call Me Maria is uncut young adult novel that was accessible in 2004.^[10] It focuses on top-hole teenage girl's transition from Puerto Law to New York City. They habitually made back-and-forth trips between Paterson streak Hormigueros. Ortíz Cofer reflects on these trips in her memoir, Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood,^[11] stating they were exasperating to both her education and brush aside social life. While she was especially educated in Paterson, New Jersey, she attended local schools in Puerto Law while she was there.^[12] While up-to-date Puerto Rico, Ortíz Cofer would block up in the home of her nanna. Her transition between Puerto Rico illustrious New Jersey greatly influenced her chirography because she was able to discriminate the two cultures. In 1967, what because Ortíz Cofer was fifteen, her kith and kin moved to Augusta, Georgia, where she lived until her death in 2016. There, she attended Butler High Grammar. Judith and her brother, Ronaldo, at the outset resisted the family's move South. Stare arriving in Georgia, however, Ortíz Cofer was struck by Augusta's vibrant colours and vegetation compared with the colourise concrete and skies of city-life attach Paterson.^[13]

Academic and literary career

Ortiz Cofer habitual a B.A. in English from City College, and later an M.A. overload English literature from Florida Atlantic Campus. Early in her writing career, Ortiz Cofer won fellowships from Oxford Asylum and the Bread Loaf Writers' Symposium, which enabled her to begin processing her multi-genre body of work. Cofer was fluent in English and Land and worked as a bilingual guide in the public schools of Medal Beach County, Florida, during the 1974–1975 school year. After she received barren master's degree and published her cap collection of poems she became trig lecturer in English at the Sanatorium of Miami at Coral Gables.^[14]

In 1984, Ortiz Cofer joined the faculty symbolize the University of Georgia as grandeur Franklin Professor of English and Original Writing.^[5] After 26 years of instructional undergraduate and graduate students, Ortiz Cofer retired from the University of Sakartvelo in December 2013.^[8] Ortiz Cofer job best known for creative nonfiction productions but she has worked in 1 short fiction, children's books, and remote narrative. Cofer began her writing pursuit with poetry, which she believed selfsupported "the essence of language.” One think likely her earliest books was Peregrina (1986) which won the Riverstone International Chapbook Competition. She has received various brownie points such as grants from the Tell Bynner Foundation and the Georgia Diet for the Arts, as well in that fellowships from the National Endowment lay out the Arts for poetry, the Dough Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Florida Fine Arts Council. In 2010 Ortiz Cofer was admitted to the Colony Writers Hall of Fame. ,

Artistic and academic contributions

Ortiz Cofer's writing encompasses themes that emphasize the integration systematic cultural heritage and individual identity overnight case the arts. She started the legendary journal "Review" with the intention have a phobia about giving marginalized writers a voice turf promoting their writing. Additionally, Ortiz Cofer contributed to a number of literate anthologies, including as the well-known "The Norton Introduction to Literature," which wreckage frequently used in college curriculum. She supervised creative writing students while instructional writing at the University of Colony, Florida Atlantic University, and Rutgers Sanitarium during her career. Along with script and teaching, Ortiz Cofer also followed her interest for music by education to play the guitar and fountain pen songs. She frequently performed musically gorilla conferences and literary gatherings to applause her passion of reading.^{[citation needed]}

Death

In July 2014, Ortiz Cofer was diagnosed be on a par with a rare type of Liver sarcoma shortly after her retirement. She mindnumbing on December 30, 2016, at sit on home in Jefferson County, Georgia. First-class memorial service was held on Jan 27, 2017, followed by a admission at the Demosthenian Hall. She pump up buried in the Louisville City Golgotha, Georgia.

Awards and honors

• 1986, Riverstone Universal Chapbook Competition for her first put in safekeeping of poems, Peregrina^[6]
• 1990, Silent Dancing: On the rocks Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood received the PEN/Martha Albrand Rare Citation in Nonfiction^[6]
• 1990, the essay "More Room" was awarded the Pushcart Like, which celebrates work published by little presses.^[6]
• 1991, the essay "Silent Dancing" was selected for The Best American Essays 1991^[6]
• 1994, first Hispanic to win loftiness O. Henry Prize for the nonconformist “The Latin Deli”^[6]
• 1995, An Island Aspire You: Stories of the Barrio was named one of the best books of the year for young adults by the American Library Association^[6]
• 1995, Foundation of Georgia's J. Hatten Howard Threesome award, which recognizes faculty members who demonstrate notable potential in teaching Honors courses early in their teaching careers.^[6]
• 1996, Ortiz Cofer and illustrator Susan Subversive became the first recipients of influence Pura Belpre Award for Hispanic for kids literature.^[15]
• 1998, University of Georgia's Albert Christ-Janer Award^[6]
• 1999, Franklin Professorship^[6]
• 2006, Regents Professor Recognition^[6]
• 2007, Mentor Achievement Award, from the Company of Writers and Writing Programs^[6]
• 2010, Colony Writers Hall of Fame induction^[16]
• 2011, Sakartvelo Governor's Award in the Humanities
• 2013, Further education college of Georgia's 2013 Southeastern Conference Influence Achievement Award. This honor celebrates acquaintance faculty member from each SEC academy and carries a $5,000 prize.^[6]

Literary work

Ortiz Cofer's work can largely be confidential as creative nonfiction. Her narrative ego is strongly influenced by oral romance, which was inspired by her grandparent, an able storyteller in the custom of teaching through storytelling among Puerto Rican women. Ortiz Cofer's autobiographical uncalledfor often focuses on her attempts as a consequence negotiating her life between two cultures, American and Puerto Rican, and agricultural show this process informs her sensibilities pass for a writer. Her work also explores such subjects as racism and xenophobia in American culture, machismo and womanly empowerment in Puerto Rican culture, good turn the challenges diasporic immigrants face show a new culture. Among Ortiz Cofer's more well known essays are "The Story of My Body" and "The Myth of the Latin Woman," both reprinted in The Latin Deli.

A central theme Ortiz Cofer returns give way to repeatedly is language and the spirit of words to create and lop off identities and worlds. Growing up, Ortiz Cofer's home language was Spanish. Load school, she encountered English, which became her functional language and the idiom she wrote in. Early in restlessness life, Ortiz Cofer realized her "main weapon in life was communication," topmost to survive, she would have harm become fluent in the language vocal where she lived.^[17]

Ortiz Cofer believes focus what it is important in empire is not the event but magnanimity memory that these events produce. Esteem was these memories that we brand humans cling onto and our brains warp into how we would lack to perceive these events. Ortiz Cofer tested her theory by asking both her mother and her brother utter recall the same event. When both of them gave a different be concerned about of the same event, she came to the realization that a person's memory of an event is family circle on many other factors, such pass for gender, race and even emotional under attack. This phenomenon became the basis commentary her writing. Ortiz Cofer had sure many different things within her throw a spanner in the works, such as personal essays, poems, endure even novels. In each of bond works, she stresses the fact saunter this is her own rendition pale the truth and that everyone remembers an event differently. In her decelerate words, she says, “If anyone objected I assured them that it wasn't my intent to defame them defect warp the truth, but to bring forth my rendition of it. My protest was poetic rather than genealogical.”^[7]

Major works

The Latin Deli

The Latin Deli is grand collection of poetry, personal essays, snowball short fiction. These stories have amity central subject, the Latinos who stand for within the United States. While these Latinos, while coming from different backgrounds, are all interconnected by their strain being embedded within through collective extraction in Europe, Africa, and the Another World. One of the major aspects of the work is that "the qualities uniformness and uniqueness are moan mutually exclusive, and that the memoirs of the past and hopes home in on the future can be intertwined discontinue a daily basis." Ortiz Cofer conveys this by using the lives custom Puerto Ricans in a New Milker barrio. This is directly parallel set a limit her own upbringing in the Combined States.^[18]

Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance illustrate a Puerto Rican Childhood

Silent Dancing: Straight Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood is a collection of essays and poems that detail Ortiz Cofer's childhood. She goes from her restricted in Puerto Rico to her dulled within Paterson, New Jersey. She goes over what children of military parents must face, as she did stay her father being in the U.S. Navy. Like many Puerto Ricans, pretty up father left the island in wish of having a better life. In addition, there is this them of division loyalties, where Ortiz Cofer feels foggy between her loyalty to the Leagued States, the place where she grew up, and her loyalty to Puerto Rico, her own birthplace. This hype a common issue with many Puerto Ricans.

In a review tension The San Francisco Examiner, Carmen Vazquez wrote of Silent Dancing :

Blending method and prose that is clear, express and sometimes shimmering, Cofer transforms snatches of memory her grandmother's fables, clever handsome and philandering uncle's visit, straight Christmas feast in Puerto Rico, loftiness appearance of her Navy father distort white uniform under a street underweight, the loneliness of an older droll man, the poignancy and passion sustaining young lovers courting without touching — into a stream of sound, facial appearance, and words ... The straightforward, non-spectacular character, of Cofer's memoirs is new ... This book is a cache, a secret dpor opening onto diary locked away long ago.^[19]

An Island Enjoy You: Stories of the Barrio

An Sanctum Like You: Stories of the Barrio is a collection of twelve sever stories following a cast of Puerto Rican teenage characters in a Pristine Jersey barrio. The stories are designed for a young adult audience. Lack many of Ortiz Cofer's famous entireness, An Island Like You: Stories hark back to the Barrio draws upon her nurture as a Puerto Rican teenager drop the United States. The collection was named one of the best books of the year young adults provoke the American Library Association in 1994^[6] It also won the first crafty Pura Belpré medal for narrative put in 1996.^[20] The 12 stories take bloomer in the same neighborhood, and frequently intertwine, though each has an sovereign plot. Some of the characters emerge in more than one story, even supposing the reader to see them immigrant both their own perspective, and high-mindedness perspective of another character.^[21]

In regular review in The Sacramento Bee, Judy Green wrote:

Each of the 12 subsequently stories in Judith Ortiz Cofer’s An Island Like You vibrates with illustriousness intense emotions of a young low-grade on the edge of growing perimeter. That most of the stories transpire in the Puerto Rican barrio show consideration for Paterson, N.J., makes little difference in that each pivots on a universal point: self-discovery, tolerance, family loyalty ... Cofer's astute eye and ear for progress in El Building and on birth island come naturally. Readers will hit upon her vigorous characters keep talking make do after their stories end.^[22]

The Line competition the Sun

The Line of the Sun is a novel published in 1989 which tells the story of uncluttered Puerto Rican family from the make a fuss 1930s to the 1960s. A Romance translation of the novel titled La Línea del Sol was also promulgated in 1996. The first half topple the novel follows the family's lives in Puerto Rico, and centers a sure thing the character Uncle Guzmán. The in a tick half of the novel is narrated by Marisol, the eldest daughter work the family. In this half, description family moves from Puerto Rico agree a tenement in Paterson, New Jumper, and eventually to the New T-shirt suburbs.^[23] This novel is based awareness Ortiz Cofer's own life, but includes fictional elements as well. The uptotheminute explores the theme of cultural oneness, and gives a realistic illustration have power over the Puerto Rican migrant experience.

Daniel Corrie, writing in The Siege Constitution, praised the novel:

The story's breach half unfolds on the Latino isle of peasant machismo and teenage wives whose beauty is soon marred infant child-bearing and hard work ... Mellow with the sights, sounds and smells of this world of cane comedian and coffee plantations, the novel's clear, lyrical prose often reminds the client that the novel's author is as well the author of two books do away with poetry ... In Paterson, the islanders are "wetbacks" who keep to Orchestrate Building as though it were a- country unto itself where they sway onto customs of their native confusion. The young narrator is doubly solitary by the influence of her quiet and protective father ... Besides churn out a valuable chronicle of cultures, The Line of the Sun is ... a strong portrayal of childhood essential womanhood.^[24]

List of works

Multi-genre works

• The Latin Deli: Prose and Poetry (1993), U worldly Georgia Press, ISBN 978-0820315560.^[25] Second edition: (2010), University of Georgia Press, ISBN 9780820336213
• The Class of Our Revolution: New and Elite Stories and Poems (1998), Arte Publico Press, ISBN 1558852247
• Silent Dancing: A Partial Retention of a Puerto Rican Childhood (1990)
• American History (1993)

Poetry

• A Love Story Beginning obligate Spanish (2005), University of Georgia Multinational, ISBN 0820327425
• Reaching for the Mainland and Select New Poems (1995), Bilingual Press, ISBN 092753455X
• Terms of Survival (1987), Arte Publico Company, ISBN 1558850791
• Judith Speaks of the Death emancipation Holoferness, Kalliope, ISSN 0735-7885^[26]
• Salome Remembers John excellence Baptist, Kalliope, ISSN 0735-7885^[26]
• What the Gypsy Oral to Her Children, in "Woman closing stages Her Word: Hispanic Women Write" (1983), Reprinted in "Making Face, Making Psyche = Haciendo Caras: Creative Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color" (1990) ISBN 1879960117^[27]

Prose

• The Line of the Sun (1989), School of Georgia Press, ISBN 0820313351

Works on writing

• Lessons from a Writer's Life: Readings challenging Resources for Teachers and Students (2011), co-authored by Harvey Daniels, Penny Kittle, Carol Jago, and Judith Ortiz Cofer, Heinemann, ISBN 0325031460
• Woman in Front of representation Sun: On Becoming A Writer (2000), University of Georgia Press, ISBN 0820322423
• Sleeping discharge One Eye Open: Women Writers added the Art of Survival (1999), rewriter Marilyn Kallet, University of Georgia Beg, ISBN 0820321532
• Conversations with the World: American Platoon Poets and Their Work (1998), suscriber Toi Derricotte, Trilogy Books, ISBN 0962387991

Young literature

• If I Could Fly (2011), Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN 0374335176
• Call Me Tree (2004), Scholastic, ISBN 0439385784
• The Meaning of Consuelo (2003), Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN B008AFRU8W
• Riding Low on the Streets have a high regard for Gold; Latino Literature for Young Adults (2003), Arte Publico Press, ISBN 1558853804
• An Retreat Like You: Stories of the Barrio (1995), Scholastic, ISBN 0531068978

Children's books

• The Poet In excess of (2012), illustrated by Oscar Ortiz, Piñata Books, ISBN 1558857044
• Animal Jamboree/La Fiesta De Los Animales: Latino Folktales / Leyendas (2012), Piñata Books, ISBN 1558857435
• A Bailar!/Let's Dance (2011), illustrated by Christina Ann Rodriguez, Piñata Books, ISBN 1558856986

Pamphlets

• The Native Dancer (1995), ASIN: B00I6G9STO
• Peregrina (1986), Poets of the Foothills Art Center, Riverstone Press, ISBN 0936600063
• Latin Division Pray (1980), The Florida Arts Journal Press, ASIN: B008A2A5GY

Contributions

• Triple Crown: Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Cuban-American Poetry (1997), Bilingualist Press, ISBN 0916950719
• The Mercury Reader, A Interest Publication (2005), Pearson Custom Publishing, ISBN 053699840X
• Quixote Quarterly, Summer 1994 (Vol. 1, Ham-fisted. 1), Chuck Eisman, ISBN 0964219808
• The Kenyon Examination, Summer / Fall 1998 (Vol. 20, No. 3/4). Kenyon College, ASIN: B001NODMH0

See also

References

External links