Javier Zamora: “Solito: Home, Identity, and the Immigrant Experience”

Memoirist and poet Javier Zamora’s memoir Solito provides an intimate account of his near-impossible journey and the unexpected moments of kindness, love, and joy scattered across perilous boat trips, desert treks, arrests, and betrayals. Longlisted for the PEN America 2023 Literary Awards, Solito was a New York Times bestseller and a 2023 American Book Award winner.

Zamora has been a Stegner fellow at Stanford University and a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard, and holds fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. Zamora has also been granted fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University, the Lannan Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, Macondo, and Yaddo. His debut poetry collection Unaccompanied is rooted in the indelible experiences of a nine-year-old boy navigating politics, racism, war, and the impact of a border crossing on his family. Zamora holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and has earned an MFA from New York University. The recipient of the 2017 Narrative Prize, the 2016 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, and the 2020 Pushcart Prize, Zamora has been published in Granta, the Kenyon Review, American Poetry, the New Republic, the New York Times, and Poetry, among other publications. Javier Zamora lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Cosponsored by the Park Street Corporation Speaker Series and Boston College Romance Languages and Literatures Department.

All Lowell Humanities Series lectures are free and open to the public. Registration via Eventbrite is required for in-person attendance.

The Lowell Humanities Series is sponsored by the Lowell Institute, Boston College's Institute for the Liberal Arts, and the Provost's Office.

Host or Publisher Lowell Humanities Series at Boston College