I don't mind categories, but these publications are keeping me from being seen as I really am, which is a student of world literature and interested … - Judith Ortiz Cofer

You can call me anything you want, but don't keep me from doing anything I want.

So my work is actually a response to the idea, like if you read my short story "Nada"-my mother's generation always had this idealized concept of the island as home and the only place where you could really be happy, like, "Oh, we were poor there, but at least we had the sun, or we had this and all this." Of course, I went back year after year, and of course I saw the sun, and it is a gorgeous island, but life was hard, difficult. So actually I don't have a nostalgic yearning for the island. I write about the dream of the island as opposed to the reality of the island.

it was poetry and literature that led me to understand that to stifle someone else's emotional life is almost immoral, that you have to let people continue to live, and that grief is one of the great shackles. If you let grief hinder you, you can become trapped in it.