A native of Puerto Rico, Judith Ortiz Cofer is best known for a collection of personal essays and poems, Silent Dancing (awarded a PEN/Martha Albrand Special Citation in nonfiction); The Latin Deli, a collection of essays, short fiction and poetry (received the Anisfield Wolf Award); and An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio (named a Best Book of the Year 1995-96 by the American Library Association). Woman in Front of the Sun: On Becoming A Writer was published in Fall 2000.

Other Ortiz Cofer titles are The Year of Our Revolution: New and Selected Poetry and Prose and Sleeping With One Eye Open, edited with Marilyn Kallet. 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 appeared in Glamour, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and Kenyon Review.

The Great Writers Lecture Series is made possible through generous contributions from the Charles K. Colver Lectureship and Publication Fund, the Zucker Family Endowment, the Goldway/Shearer family, the Dean of the College, the Department of Physics, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, the Literary Arts Program, the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research, the Department of Modern Culture and Media, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Africana Studies Department, and the Department of Hispanic Studies.