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Everybody Reads: SOLITO by Javier Zamora

Tue, March 11 from 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm PDT
1037 SW Broadway Portland, OR 97205

$25-$65

In partnership with Multnomah County Library and the Library Foundation, Literary Arts is proud to host an evening with Javier Zamora as the culminating event of the Library’s Everybody Reads program. This year’s selection is Zamora’s memoir, Solito.

Everybody Reads is an annual community-wide project that promotes shared reading and discussion around a single book.

Copies of the book will be available for free at all Multnomah County Library branches thanks to the generosity of The Library Foundation in January 2025, while supplies last.

About the book

Solito is an account of Zamora’s 3,000-mile journey from El Salvador to the United States when he was nine years old. His crossing involved perilous boat trips and relentless desert treks during two life-altering months alongside a group of strangers who became an unexpected family.

He traveled 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.

“The magic of this book lies not only in the beguiling voice of young Javier, or the harrowing journey and immense bravery of the migrants, or in the built-in hero’s journey of this narrative. It’s hard to reconcile the fact that this book hasn’t always been with us. How can something so essential and fundamental to the American story not already be part of our canon?”–San Francisco Chronicle

How to participate in Everybody Reads

Read

Check out Solito from the library, available in Spanish or English.

Discuss, learn and be inspired

Explore the project guide or check the library events calendar for information. From January to March, 2025 you can attend free events surrounding the book and its themes.

 

Thank you to our supporters:

To create access for our wider community we need the support of event sponsors.
If you or your company is interested in sponsorship, please email development@literary-arts.org.

 

Javier Zamora

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 is the winner of a 2024 Whiting Fellowship and the 2022 LA Times-Christopher Isherwood Prize. He 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 2018-2019 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University, a 2017 Lannan Literary Fellowshipthe 2017 Narrative Prize, the 2016 Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award for his work in the Undocupoets Campaign.

Javier lives in Tucson, AZ, where he volunteers with Salvavision, The Kino Border Initiative, and The Florence Project.

Read more
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Everybody Reads: SOLITO by Javier Zamora
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