Javier Zamora was nine years old when he traveled Unaccompanied 4,000 miles, across multiple borders, from El Salvador to the United States to be reunited with his parents.
He earned a BA at UC-Berkeley, an MFA at New York University, and is a 2016-2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University..
Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador and immigrated to the United States at the age of nine.
And again―like everyone does.
He knew we would try again.
He must\'ve remembered his family coming over the border, or the border coming over them, because he drove us to the border and told us next time, rest at least five days, don\'t trust anyone calling themselves coyotes, bring more tortillas, sardines, Alhambra.
From Let Me Try Again He knew we weren\'t Mexican.
Through an unflinching gaze, plainspoken diction, and a combination of Spanish and English, Unaccompanied crosses rugged terrain where families are lost and reunited, coyotes lead migrants astray, and the thin white man let us drink from a hose / while pointing his shotgun.
This dramatic and hope-filled poetry debut humanizes the highly charged and polarizing rhetoric of border-crossing; assesses borderland politics, race, and immigration on a profoundly personal level; and simultaneously remembers and imagines a birth country that\'s been left behind.
Javier Zamora was nine years old when he traveled Unaccompanied 4,000 miles, across multiple borders, from El Salvador to the United States to be reunited with his parents
