Born in La Herradura, El Salvador, poet Javier Zamora was raised by his grandparents after his father and then his mother fled to the US during the US-funded Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992). He migrated to the US alone at the age of nine, in a nine-week odyssey across Guatemala and through the Sonoran Desert that he retells in his just published memoir, Solito. His first poetry collection, Unaccompanied, explores some of these themes. Zamora was a 2018-2019 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and has received fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University, MacDowell, Macondo, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and Yaddo. He is the recipient of a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, the 2017 Narrative Prize, and the 2016 Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award for his work in the Undocupoets Campaign. Zamora and his wife currently live in Tucson, Arizona.
www.javierzamora.net