"People ask me: If I am a Puerto Rican writer, why don't I write in Spanish"" the poet, essayist, and author Judith Ortiz Cofer wrote in the on-line publication, The Global Education Project. "Isn't writing in English a sellout? I respond that English is my literary language. The language of the country my parents brought me to. Spanish is my familial language, that lies between the lines of my English language. Because I am a daughter of the Puerto Rican diaspora, English gives life to my writing."

Such bilingual concerns are part of the territory for Cofer, born in Puerto Rico and raised in the U.S. A member of the Puerto Rican "diaspora," she however differs from other well-known writers of that experience in that she is a woman writing in standard American English, and she writes not of immigrant life in New York, but of life...