Silent Dancing is a personal narrative made up of Judith Ortiz Cofer’s recollections of the bilingual-bicultural childhood that forged her personality as a writer and artist. The daughter of a Navy man, Ortiz Cofer was born in Puerto Rico and spent her childhood shuttling between the small island of her birth and New Jersey. In fluid and incisive prose, as well as in the poems that elaborate the narrative, Ortiz Cofer has created an important addition to women’s and Hispanic literature.
Silent Dancing has been awarded the 1991 PEN/Martha Albrand Special Citation for Nonfiction and has been selected for The New York Public Library’s 1991 Best Books for the Teen Age.
1991 PEN/Martha Albrand Special Citation for Nonficiton
“Even for young readers, this is a delightful, thoughtful assessment of a bicultural, bilingual life.”—Booklist
JUDITH ORTIZ COFER, a poet, novelist, and essayist, is the author of numerous award winning books, including An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio (Orchid Books 1995, Penguin, 1997), recipient of the 1995 Pura Belpré Award, the ALA Best Books for Young Adults and the Horn Book/Fanfare Best Book of the Year List. Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood (Arte Público Press 1991) received a PEN citation, the Martha Albrand Award for non-fiction, and a Pushcart Prize for the essay “More Room.” She is the recipient of the 1999 Paterson Prize for Books for Young People for The Year of Our Revolution. Most recently, she has published a bilingual book for children, ¡A bailar! / Let’s Dance! (Piñata Books, 2011); Animal Jamboree: Latino Folktales /La fiesta de los animals: leyendas latinas (Piñata Books, 2012), a bilingual collection of Puerto Rican folktales for middle readers, and The Poet Upstairs (Piñata Books, 2012), an inspiring picture book that demonstrates how poetry can change the world. She was a long-time professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia before her death in 2016.
ATOS Interest Level: Upper Grades
Category: Young Adult
ATOS Spanish: 7.2
Accelerated Reader Quiz #: 20913
