Who influenced Judith Ortiz Cofer to write?

From what I learned, Ortiz Cofer had a teaching career first. Her maternal Grandfather built homes, but also wrote poetry and would read it to her. Her maternal grandmother was a storyteller, and who could adapt any story to her audience. Both grandparents had the gift of imagination and a talent for expression. In spite of this ancestry, Ortiz Cofer had not considered writing poetry until she was nearly at the end of her graduate studies. In a 1997 interview with Stephanie Gordon for the Associated Writing Programs Chronicle, Ortiz Cofer told of how, when she was writing her thesis and "working with powerful Words," she "started feeling a need that writing the thesis did not fulfill." She began to express these feelings by writing down ideas, which later became her first poems. Eventually, and on the advice of Betty Owens, her department chair, Ortiz Cofer began to submit her poems for publication. The New Mexico Humanities Review became one of the first professional journals to publish her work.

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