[3][4] Her critically acclaimed and award-winning work spans a range of literary genres including poetry, short stories, autobiography, essays, and young-adult fiction.

In 2010, Ortiz Cofer was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame,[5] and in 2013, she won the university's 2014 Southeastern Conference Faculty Achievement Award.

[6] Ortiz Cofer hailed from a family of storytellers and drew heavily from her personal experiences as a Puerto Rican American woman.

Ortiz Cofer's work weaves together private life and public space through intimate portrayals of family relationships and rich descriptions of place.

Ortíz Cofer reflects on these trips in her memoir, Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood,[11] stating they were annoying to both her education and her social life.

Upon arriving in Georgia, however, Ortíz Cofer was struck by Augusta's vibrant colors and vegetation compared with the gray concrete and skies of city-life in Paterson.

Early in her writing career, Ortiz Cofer won fellowships from Oxford University and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, which enabled her to begin developing her multi-genre body of work.

After she received her master's degree and published her first collection of poems she became a lecturer in English at the University of Miami at Coral Gables.

Cofer began her writing career with poetry, which she believed contained "the essence of language.” One of her earliest books was Peregrina (1986) which won the Riverstone International Chapbook Competition.

, Ortiz Cofer's writing encompasses themes that emphasize the integration of cultural heritage and individual identity through the arts.

Additionally, Ortiz Cofer contributed to a number of literary anthologies, including as the well-known "The Norton Introduction to Literature," which is frequently used in college curriculum.

[citation needed] In July 2014, Ortiz Cofer was diagnosed with a rare type of liver cancer shortly after her retirement.

Ortiz Cofer's autobiographical work often focuses on her attempts at negotiating her life between two cultures, American and Puerto Rican, and how this process informs her sensibilities as a writer.

A central theme Ortiz Cofer returns to repeatedly is language and the power of words to create and shape identities and worlds.

One of the major aspects of the work is that "the qualities uniformness and uniqueness are not mutually exclusive, and that the memories of the past and hopes for the future can be intertwined on a daily basis."

In a review in The San Francisco Examiner, Carmen Vazquez wrote of Silent Dancing :Blending poetry and prose that is clear, precise and sometimes shimmering, Cofer transforms snatches of memory her grandmother's fables, a handsome and philandering uncle's visit, a Christmas feast in Puerto Rico, the appearance of her Navy father in white uniform under a street lamp, the loneliness of an older gay man, the poignancy and passion of young lovers courting without touching — into a stream of sound, color, and words ...

Like many of Ortiz Cofer's famous works, An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio draws upon her upbringing as a Puerto Rican teenager in the United States.

The collection was named one of the best books of the year young adults by the American Library Association in 1994[6] It also won the first ever Pura Belpré medal for narrative in 1996.

In a review in The Sacramento Bee, Judy Green wrote:Each of the 12 short stories in Judith Ortiz Cofer’s An Island Like You vibrates with the intense emotions of a young teenager on the edge of growing up.

That most of the stories occur in the Puerto Rican barrio of Paterson, N.J., makes little difference because each pivots on a universal point: self-discovery, tolerance, family loyalty ... Cofer's astute eye and ear for life in El Building and on the island come naturally.