I was born a white girl in Puerto Rico but became a brown girl when I came to live in the United States. - Judith Ortiz Cofer

I feel the poet does write on memory but... Wasn't it Aristotle who said the historian keeps the factual record of mankind and the poet writes the emotional history of mankind? I think you can read a history of Vietnam and know that so many men under the age of twenty were killed, or you can read Tim O'Brien and you can "feel" those deaths. O'Brien is preserving the emotional history of Vietnam. A historian is preserving the facts.

God is supposed to understand all languages. But it's like "silent dancing"-if everyone is acting like they don't understand you when you don't speak the language of the mainstream,

for two years the manuscript was circulating around New York, and my agent was getting rejections like, "It's beautifully written, but who wants to read about poor Puerto Ricans?”