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Published Sep 2017
88 pages
Genre: Poetry & Novels in Verse
Publication Information
Through an unflinching gaze, plainspoken diction, and a combination of Spanish and English, Unaccompanied crosses rugged terrain where families are lost and reunited, coyotes lead migrants astray, and "the thin white man let us drink from a hose / while pointing his shotgun."
Javier Zamora was nine years old when he traveled unaccompanied 4,000 miles, across multiple borders, from El Salvador to the United States to be reunited with his parents. This dramatic and hope-filled poetry debut humanizes the highly charged and polarizing rhetoric of border-crossing; assesses borderland politics, race, and immigration on a profoundly personal level; and simultaneously remembers and imagines a birth country that's been left behind.
"Zamora's work is real life turned into myth and myth made real life." - Glappitnova
"Every line resonates with a wind that crosses oceans." - Jamaal May
This information about Unaccompanied was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador and immigrated to the U.S. at the age of nine. He earned a BA at UC-Berkeley and an MFA at New York University and is a 2016-2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
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