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Judith Ortíz Cofer was born in Hormigueros, Puerto Rico, in 1952, to young parents. Her father, Jesus Lugo Ortíz, joined the U.S. Navy before Ortíz Cofer was born, leaving her and her mother, Fanny Morot, alone while he was stationed overseas in Panama for two years. In 1956, seeking better economic opportunities, the family moved to Paterson, New Jersey, where Ortíz Cofer lived for most of her childhood. Because her father was stationed in Brooklyn and frequently absent, Ortíz Cofer spent much of her childhood traveling back and forth between Paterson and Puerto Rico with her mother. Later in life, she cited her grandmother’s storytelling style as a major influence in her own writing, noting that although she had little formal education, she transfixed the family with her stories, transforming ordinary people into archetypes and manipulating the details of a story for different occasions and audiences while insisting on its perfect truthfulness, techniques Ortíz Cofer credits with teaching her about storytelling as an art form.

In 1967, when she was 15, Ortíz Cofer moved with her family to Georgia, where she lived for most of the rest of her life. Although she came to love the natural beauty of Augusta, the city they moved to, she found herself without a substantial Puerto Rican community there. After high school in Augusta, where she was one of only three people of color in her graduating class, she earned her undergraduate degree at Augusta College, where she met and married John Cofer. While earning her M.A. in English literature at Florida Atlantic University, Ortíz Cofer began writing poetry. Although works like The Line of the Sun and The Latin Deli built Ortíz Cofer’s reputation for writing fiction and essays, her first published works were poems, and she continued to write poetry throughout her life. In 1984, she joined the faculty of the University of Georgia, where she spent the bulk of her teaching career, and whose press published many of her books. A champion at UGA for other women of color writers, Ortíz Cofer was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2010. Diagnosed with a rare liver cancer shortly after her retirement in 2013, she died in 2016.

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