Spanish and Hispanic Studies Green Honors Chair – “ A Conversation with Javier Zamora: Solito: Home, Identity, and the Immigrant Experience.”

Javier Zamora is one of the most important contemporary Central American writers and poets in the United States. In his New York Times bestselling memoir, Solito (2022), Javier retells his odyssey across Guatemala, Mexico, and eventually through the Sonoran Desert when he was nine years old. He travelled unaccompanied by boat, bus, and foot. After his trafficker abandoned his group in Oaxaca, Javier managed to make it to Arizona with the aid of other migrants. His poetry collection, Unaccompanied (2017), explores the impact of the war and immigration on his family. Javier Zamora’s writings are deeply human, and they refer to the effects of the Salvadoran Civil War, immigration, family ties and solidarity for young people, particularly unaccompanied children. Zamora was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and holds fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Foundation (Ruth Lilly), Stanford University (Stegner), among others. He is the recipient of a 2017 Lannan Literary Fellowship, the 2017 Narrative Prize, and the 2016 Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award for his work in the Undocupoets Campaign. This will be an illuminating conversation with a poet and writer that you do not want to miss.