Thursday, November 14, 2002

WRITER: Phil Williams, 706/542-8501, phil@franklin.uga.edu
CONTACT: Judith Ortiz Cofer, 706/542-2223, jocofer@uga.edu

UGA PROFESSOR JUDITH ORTIZ COFER TO DELIVER KEYNOTE ADDRESS AT NATIONAL COUNCIL OF TEACHERS OF ENGLISH MEETING

ATHENS, Ga. — On a recent East Coast reading tour, novelist, poet and essayist Judith Ortiz Cofer discovered, in one poignant moment, what writers and writing can mean.

Cofer, the Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, was visiting a middle school in her hometown of Paterson, N.J. The teacher in one class said they had a surprise for Cofer, and when she counted to three, all the students held up a copy of Cofer’s book An Island Like You, which was required reading in all seventh- and eighth-grade classrooms in the Paterson School District. The moment was deeply moving for Cofer, who was on tour helping colleges and public schools celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month.

"The thought that these children were reading my stories in the same place I grew up was thrilling," she said. "It was really a crucial moment to me, because they had something I never had when I was growing up there — a literary model, someone like themselves in the books they read. The city is not the most beautiful one, but those students were so full of life. When they grow up, maybe they will tell their stories, too."

Cofer will talk about the importance of education and how reading shapes students when she delivers a keynote address to the National Council of Teachers of English meeting in Atlanta on Thursday, Nov. 21. Her speech will be at the opening banquet of NCTE’s 92nd Annual Convention, which will be held at the Atlanta Hilton and Atlanta Mariott Marquis hotels.

"At another class during my time in Paterson, I visited with a group of hearing-impaired children, and their teacher signed my words as I read," said Cofer. "That was a special moment for me also — seeing how the written word connected the children in their silent world, much as oral storytelling brings hearing people together in a communal experience."

Cofer has been a faculty member at UGA since 1984. A widely published novelist, poet and essayist, she has received numerous honors during her writing career, including a Rockefeller Foundation Residency in Italy, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for her book The Latin Deli: Prose and Poetry and a nomination for a National Book Award. More than 150 of her poems, essays, short stories and novel excerpts have been selected for reprinting in anthologies, textbooks and collections.

Among her many books are such novels as The Line of the Sun and such memoirs as Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood. She has published poetry and prose in many of America’s most distinguished literary journals. In addition, Cofer has been a featured reader and keynote speaker at numerous universities around the country.

She has taught many courses at UGA over the years, including a specially designed honors course in composition and literature that introduces students to the diversity of writers in American literature today and courses on multicultural American literature and the literature of women.

The NCTE is devoted to improving the teaching and learning of English and the English language arts at all levels of education. Since 1911, NCTE has provided a forum for the profession. It currently has some 75,000 members and subscribers in the United States and other countries.

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