Javier Zamora

Javier Zamora is a rising star in the literary world of the Americas. He was born in the small Salvadoran town of La Herradura and immigrated to the US at nine, joining his parents in California and growing up undocumented. Zamora earned his BA at UC Berkeley and his MFA at NYU, where he studied with Yusef Komunyakaa, Sharon Olds, and Charles Simic. Zamora’s first chapbook, Nueve Años Inmigrantes/Nine Immigrant Years, engaged with history, borders, and memory, winning the 2011 Organic Weapon Arts contest. Since then, his poems have been featured in Granta, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New York Times, and many others. He has received many honors, including an NEA fellowship, the 2016 Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a 2016-2018 Wallace Stegner Fellowship, the 2017 Lannan Literary Fellowship, and the 2017 Narrative Prize. He is a founding member of the Undocupoets, which received the Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award In 2016, for working to promote undocumented or previously undocumented writers. Most recently he was a 2018-2019 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University, where he was working on his memoir and second collection of poems. He lives in Harlem, NY.