Judith Ortiz Cofer came from a family that loved to tell stories. She often used her own life experiences as a Puerto Rican American woman in her writing. She wrote about women’s issues, Latino culture, and life in the American South. Her stories often showed how private family life and public spaces connect. Some of her work is steeped in mythology and folklore, explorations of religion, tradition, memory, storytelling, and spirituality.

Ortiz Cofer was born in the small town of Hormigueros, Puerto Rico on February 24, 1952. Her parents came to the United States when she was a child, and settled in Paterson, New Jersey. Her military father was stationed at Brooklyn’s Navy Yard, and her mother was often nostalgic for her beloved island. Because of this Ortiz Cofer spent portions of her childhood commuting between the two worlds of Hormigueros, Puerto Rico, and Paterson, New Jersey.

Even though most of her schooling was in Paterson, Ortiz Cofer 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. Her experience in both locations shines through in her writing. She captures life on the island powerfully, as well as the harsh realities of the Paterson community.

However, those two locations were not the only ones that shaped Ortiz Cofer growing up. When she was fifteen years old, she moved with her family to Augusta, Georgia. She pursued  higher education and received an undergraduate degree in English from Augusta College and an M.A. from Florida Atlantic University. In 1984, she joined the faculty at the University of Georgia.

Her 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 she began to receive more critical attention.

The Line of the Sun was also the first of Ortiz 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 grandmother, who appears as a character in The Line of the Sun and many of her other narratives. “When my abuela [grandmother] 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 received many awards for her excellent writing ability. Silent Dancing (1990), a collection of personal short stories, received the 1991 PEN/Martha Albrand Special Citation in Nonfiction. The short story “More Room” featured in it was awarded a Pushcart Prize in 1990. An Island Like You (1995) received the Reforma Pura Belpré Award and was listed among the “Best Books for Young Adults” by the American Library Association. Woman in Front of the Sun (2000)  won the Georgia Writers Association’s Georgia Author of the Year Award in creative nonfiction in 2001.

In all, Ortiz Cofer wrote over fifteen books. In 2010, She was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. By her retirement in 2013, Ortiz Cofer was the Regents’ and Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. She passed away at her family farm in Louisville, Georgia, in December 2016.