Javier Zamora

Javier Zamora (born 1990) is a Salvadoran poet and activist.

Zamora was born in San Luis La Herradura, El Salvador and immigrated to the United States at the age of nine, joining his parents in California.

Zamora's chapbook Nueve Años Inmigrantes/Nine Immigrant Years won the 2011 Organic Weapon Arts Contest, and his first poetry collection, Unaccompanied, was published in 2017 by Copper Canyon Press.

His poetry can be found in American Poetry Review, Best New Poets 2013, Kenyon Review, Narrative Magazine, The New Republic, The New York Times, Ploughshares, and Poetry.

He earned a BA at the University of California, Berkeley and an MFA at New York University and was a 2016–2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Zamora's honors include Barnes & Noble Writer for Writer's Award (2016), Meridian Editors’ Prize, and the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.

Zamora has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, CantoMundo, Colgate University, The Frost Place, MacDowell Colony, The Macondo Writers Workshop, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Creative Writing, and Yaddo.

In 2017, Zamora was awarded the Narrative Prize for "Sonoran Song," "To the President-Elect," and "Thoughts on the Anniversary of My Crossing the Sonoran Desert".

In 2023 he received a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award for Solito: A Memoir.

Zamora was a founder, with poets Marcelo Hernandez Castillo and Christopher Soto (AKA Loma), of the Undocupoets campaign which eliminated citizenship requirements from major first poetry book prizes in the United States.

- The poetry book "Unaccompanied" by Javier Zamora provides a moving and intimate viewpoint on the experience of migration and the difficulties unaccompanied Central American children have when crossing the border between the United States and Mexico.

Zamora explores ideas of identity, belonging, and the pursuit of home using strong and vivid language.

These young refugees' experiences are made very relatable and understandable by the poems' vivid imagery and poetic approach.

The book transports readers through the emotional landscapes of migration while illuminating the struggles endured by people looking for a better life.

The poems become more real and emotionally resonant due to Zamora's personal connection to the subject matter, which also provides a counternarrative and humanizes the experiences of unaccompanied children.

"Unaccompanied" poses significant queries regardg immigration laws, human rights, and the effects of boundaries on people and families.

Zamora's contribution to "Unaccompanied" has won several awards and praise.

The collection won the Northern California Book Award 2018 and was a finalist for the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.nThe Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship is one of the many literary honors bestowed to Zamora.