Javier Zamora (born 1990)[1] is a Salvadoran American poet and activist.[2]
Javier Zamora | |
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![]() Zamora, reading at Sacred Heart School, Washington, D.C. 2018 | |
Born | 1990 San Luis La Herradura, El Salvador |
Language | English, Spanish |
Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley (BA) New York University (MFA) |
Genre | Poetry, Prose |
Notable works | Unaccompanied, SOLITO |
Notable awards | Wallace Stegner Fellow, NEA Fellow, Lannan Foundation Fellow, Ruth Lilly Fellow, Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard University |
Spouse | Married |
Website | |
javierzamora |
Zamora was born in San Luis La Herradura, El Salvador[3] and immigrated to the United States at the age of nine, joining his parents in California.[4][2]
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.[5][2]
Zamora's chapbook Nueve Años Inmigrantes/Nine Immigrant Years won the 2011 Organic Weapon Arts Contest, and his first poetry collection, Unaccompanied,[6] 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.
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,[7] MacDowell Colony, The Macondo Writers Workshop, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Creative Writing, and Yaddo.[8][5] 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".[9][10]
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.[3][11]
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