Biography

Judith Ortiz Cofer is the author of a novel, The Line of the Sun (University of Georgia Press, 1991), a collection of short stories, An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio (Puffin, 1996), a collection of essays and poetry, The Year of Our Revolution (Arte Público Press, 1998), and Latin Deli: Prose and Poetry (W.W. Norton and Company, 1995). Cofer has penned a memoir, Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood (Arte Público Press, 1991), and she has published two books of poetry, Terms of Survival (Arte Público Press, 1995) and Reaching for the Mainland(Bilingual Press, 1995). The Line of the Sun was published in Spanish as La linea del sol (University of Puerto Rico Press, 1997), and Silent Dancing was published in Spanish as Bailando en silencio (Arte Público Press, 1998).

Cofer's work has appeared in Glamour, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, and other journals. She has been anthologized in The Best American Essays, The Norton Book of Women's Lives, The Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Prize Stories. Her work has been selected for the Syndicated Fiction Project.

Cofer has been widely recognized as a writer, receiving critical praise and various awards. A PEN/ Martha Albrand Special Citation in non-fiction was awarded to her for Silent Dancing. In 1994, she was recognized with the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for The Latin Deli. She has received fellowships from the NEA and the Witter Bynner Foundation for poetry. Her collection of short stories, An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio, (Orchard Books 1995, Penguin U.S.A., 1996) was named a Best Book of the Year, 1995-96 by the American Library Association. It was also awarded the first Pura Belpre medal by REFORMA of ALA in 1996. She is the 1998 recipient of the Christ-Janner Award in Creative Research from the University of Georgia, and she was awarded the Georgia Author of the Year Prize in 2001 for her book of essays and poems Woman in Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer (University of Georgia Press).

A native of Puerto Rico, she now resides in Georgia where she is the Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. Currently, she is the Vanderbilt University's Gertrude Vanderbilt and Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writer in Residence at Vanderbilt University for spring 2001.