Writers for Democratic Action and Book the Vote present…

in conversation with WDA national steering committee member

Immigration and American Democracy: A Conversation

Saturday, June 24,  2 PM (ET)/ 1 PM (CT) / 12 PM (MT), 11 AM (PT)

Join us for "Immigration and American Democracy: A Conversation" with Javier Zamora, author of the acclaimed memoir "Solito" and  Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Peter Balakian.

Book the Vote is a national drive bringing together readers, writers, booksellers, publishers, and librarians in order to register voters in advance of the 2024 elections.

Javier Zamora was born in La Herradura, El Salvador in 1990. When he was a year old, his father fled El Salvador due to the US-funded Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992). His mother followed her husband’s footsteps in 1995 when Javier was about to turn five. Zamora was left at the care of his grandparents who helped raise him until he migrated to the US when he was nine. His first poetry collection, Unaccompanied (Copper Canyon Press, September 2017), explores some of these themes. 

In his debut New York Times bestselling memoir, SOLITO (Hogarth, September 2022), Javier retells his nine-week odyssey across Guatemala, Mexico, and eventually through the Sonoran Desert. He travelled unaccompanied by boat, bus, and foot. After a coyote abandoned his group in Oaxaca, Javier managed to make it to Arizona with the aid of other migrants. 

Zamora was a 2018-2019 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University (Olive B. O'Connor), MacDowell, Macondo, the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Foundation (Ruth Lilly), Stanford University (Stegner), and Yaddo. 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.

Javier lives in Tucson, AZ.

Peter Balakian is the author of Ozone Journal winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the memoir Black Dog of Fate, winner of the PEN/Albrand Award, and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and American's Response, winner of the Raphael Lemkin Prize, and is a founding member of Writers For Democratic Action. He is Rebar Professor of the Humanities in the department of English at Colgate University.

WRITERS FOR DEMOCRATIC ACTION presents the DEMOCRACY BOOK CLUB: Javier Zamora & Peter Balakian