THE TEN GREATEST ESSAYS, EVER
Judith Ortiz Cofer
Russell Baker, “Growing Up”
(from Growing Up, 1982)
Brain Doyle, “Joyas Voladoras”
(from The American Scholar, 2004)
Chang-Rae Lee, “Coming Home Again”
(from The New Yorker, October 16, 1995)
Maxine Hong Kingston, “No Name Woman”
(from The Woman Warrior, 1976)
Richard Rodriguez, “Complexion”
(from The Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, 1981)
Amy Tan, “Mother Tongue”
(from The Threepenny Review, 1991)
Annie Dillard, “Living Like Weasels”
(from Teaching a Stone to Talk, 1982)
Robert Frost, “The Figure a Poem Makes”
(from The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, 1939)
Naomi Shihab Nye, Three Pokes of a Thistle
(from Never in a Hurry, 1996)
Alice Walker, “Looking for Zora”
(from Ms., 1975)
About Judith Ortiz Cofer
Judith Ortiz Cofer is the author of fifteen books, including the essay collections Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood, The Latin Deli, and Woman in Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer. Her essays have been anthologized in numerous collections, including Best American Essays, The Norton Introduction to Literature, and the Heath Anthology of American Literature. Her work has received a Pushcart Prize, the Americas Award, and the first-ever Pura Belpre Prize from the American Library Association. Also honored by fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Cofer is Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, where she has taught for almost twenty-five years