Judith Ortiz Cofer's two collections of short fiction, formally titled The Latin Deli: Telling the Lives of Barrio Women (1993) and An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio (1995), follows the stories Puerto Rican women and teenagers living in New Jersey barrios (literally meaning neighborhood, but used more specifically to refer to "rough" neighborhoods with high poverty levels).
The eponymous poem of The Latin Deli made Ortiz-Cofer the first Latina to win the O. Henry Prize in 1994. In 1995, An Island Like You earned Ortiz-Cofer the first-ever Pura Belpré medal for the best representation of the "Latino cultural experience in a work of literature for children or youth" and was named one of the American Library Association's best books of the year. The collection, although originally written in English, was translated into Spanish in 1997 "due to a growing interest in her work in Puerto Rico and in other Spanish-speaking countries".
