Book Talk with Javier Zamora

Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes poet Javier Zamora for a reading and signing of his moving, page-turning memoir, Solito—the unforgettable story of his harrowing migration from El Salvador to the United States at the age of nine. Sandra Cisneros says Solito is “the mythic journey of our era” and Francisco Cantú calls it “a new landmark in the literature of migration, and in nonfiction writ large.”

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.