MACON- Acclaimed creative writer Judith Ortiz Cofer will visit Mercer University on Tuesday, October 26, for a poetry and creative writing reading and book signing. The poetry reading will begin at 6:30 p.m. in the Connell Conference Room I in Mercer’s Connell Student Center on the Macon Campus, with the book signing to immediately follow. The event is free and open to the public.
The event is sponsored by the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Mercer with co-sponsors Quad Works, Campus Life, the Foreign Language Department, the English Department, the First Year Seminar Program, and the College of Liberal Arts Dean’s Office.
Cofer is the author of the forthcoming Call Me Maria, a young adult novel; The Meaning of Consuelo, a novel; Woman in Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer, a collection of essays; The Line of the Sun, a novel; Silent Dancing, a collection of essays and poetry; two books of poetry: Terms of Survival and Reaching for the Mainland; and The Latin Deli: Prose and Poetry.
Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Glamour and other journals. Her work has been included in numerous textbooks and anthologies including: Best American Essays 1991, The Norton Book of Women’s Lives, The Norton Introduction to Literature, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, The Heath Anthology of American Literature, The Pushcart Prize, and the O. Henry Prize Stories.
Her novel The Meaning of Consuelo was selected as one of two winners of the 2003 Americas Award, sponsored by the National Consortium of Latin American Studies Programs, for U.S. published titles that authentically and engagingly portray Latin America, the Caribbean, or Latinos in the United States. The novel was also included on the New York Public Library’s “Books for the Teen Age 2004 List.” In addition to numerous other awards and honors, A PEN/Martha Albrand Special Citation in non-fiction was awarded to Cofer for Silent Dancing as well as the Anisfield Wolf Book Award for The Latin Deli, and her work has been selected for the Syndicated Fiction Project.
The Rockefeller Foundation awarded her a residency at the Bellagio, Italy, Conference Center in 1999. During spring 2001, she was Vanderbilt University’s Gertrude and Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writer in Residence. Cofer is the Franklin Professor of English at the University of Georgia.
