The Salvadorian poet on his journey to the US as a nine-year-old, the exciting literature coming from his homeland – and why he is indebted to Dave Eggers
Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador in 1990. Both his parents emigrated to the US before he turned five. At the age of just nine, Zamora undertook a treacherous journey by land and sea to join them in California – events recalled in his debut poetry collection, Unaccompanied, and now in his memoir, Solito, described by Dave Eggers as “a riveting tale of perseverance and the lengths humans will go to help each other in times of struggle”. A graduate of the creative writing programme at New York University and a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University, California, Zamora lives with his wife in Tucson, Arizona.
What prompted you to write this book?
A lot of things, but mainly the weight of the trauma that I carried for so many years. My book of poems begins to touch on these themes, but I was lying to myself that writing poetry about something so traumatic was enough. I began to write this book during Donald Trump’s America, when everybody was talking about immigration. In 2017, when we had the Central American child crisis at the border, it seemed it was the first time Americans realised that there had been child migrants. It angered me that they didn’t realise it had been occurring for decades, and I was part of that.
