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Javier Zamora
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador in 1990. His father fled the country when he was one, and his mother when he was about to turn five. Both parents’ migrations were caused by the U.S.-funded Salvadoran Civil War. When he was nine Javier migrated through Guatemala, Mexico, and the Sonoran Desert. His debut poetry collection, Unaccompanied, explores the impact of the war and immigration on his family. Zamora has been a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard and holds fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation.
WHY HE’S JOINING US
Javier Zamora’s astonishing “Solito” is the most memorable debut memoir since Tara Westover’s “Educated.” It tells the harrowing story of the author’s 3,000-mile, four-months-long journey without parents or family from his tiny village in El Salvador through Guatemala, Mexico, and across the border into the United States when he was only nine years old. No better words can describe the experience of this book than those of novelist Emma Straub: “I read ‘Solito’ with my heart in my throat and did not burst into tears until the last sentence. What a person, what a writer, what a book.”
LATEST WORK
