BOOK PASSAGE BOOKSTORE& LEFT COAST WRITERS
present
Javier Zamora reading from his new book
Unaccompanied
and in conversation with his former teacher, Marin County Poet Laureate Rebecca Foust
 
Book Passage Bookstore and Left Coast Writers invite the public to a poetry reading and book release party on Monday December 4, 7 PM – 9 PM at Book Passage Bookstore, at 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera, CA 94925. Bay Area rising star Javier Zamora will read from Unaccompanied, a new collection of poetry that chronicles his migration from El Salvador to the United States following the Salvadoran Civil War. These poems tell the particular story of the U.S.-backed violence that ravaged Central America during the 1980s, but their broader meditations on familial loss at the hands of state violence and forced migration are timely and crucial.

A reading will be followed by a conversation led by Zamora’s former teacher and mentor, Marin County Poet Laureate Rebecca Foust. This event is free and open to the public and refreshments (Salvadoran beer and pupusas!) will be served.

Praise for Unaccompanied (Copper Canyon Press 2017):

A “heartbreaking account” of migrating to “not the promised land but barbwire and barbwire.
—Publisher’s Weekly

“I’ll never be a citizen,” Zamora declares in Unaccompanied’s, opening poem. “I can’t go back and return.” Without the proper papers, you can’t leave the U.S. because you won’t be allowed back in. But the legal bind underlines a deeper question: If you are both profoundly American and inescapably Salvadoran, can you ever feel like you belong fully to either country?
—The New Yorker

“Ezra Pound said poetry is news that stays news. Rarely however, does it begin as actual news, ripped from today's headlines. Despite great grief, this book also dreams of a healed world, and It will stand as a powerful refutation to anyone who claims open borders do not enrich our nation.” —Craig Morgan Teicher, writing for NPR

A resident of San Rafael, Zamora is a 2016-2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow and holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University, MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Yaddo. The recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly/Dorothy Sargent Fellowship and the 2016 Barnes and Noble Writer for Writers Award, his poems appear in Granta, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The New York Times, and elsewhere. For more information, visit http://www.javierzamora.net/