So begins Javier Zamora’s adventure, a 3,000-mile journey from a fishing village in El Salvador through Guatemala and Mexico and across the U.S. border. Solito tells the story of that journey, written in diary form from the perspective of a precocious 9-year-old. It also tells a larger story of lives uprooted by civil war and gang violence, of America’s sometimes cruel border policies, and of strangers willing to risk everything they have to help a child.
If there’s one book in our Fall ’23 series you won’t be able to put down, Solito is it. Javier Zamora’s memoir has all the elements of a Greek epic except, in this case, the hero is a boy too short to ride the roller coaster at Disneyworld.
Born in El Salvador in 1990, in the midst of that country’s brutal civil war, Javier Zamora spent his early childhood living with grandparents and siblings after his parents were forced to flee. In addition to Solito, Mr. Zamora is the author of a collection of poems, Unaccompanied. He has won fellowships from Colgate University, Harvard University, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and the Lannan Literary Foundation, among others. For his work on the Undocupoets campaign, Barnes & Noble awarded him its Writer for Writers prize. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.
When Javier Zamora composed Chapter 4, the scene on the boat, he did it in one big rush—5,000 words in one sitting—and realized afterward that the whole memoir needed to be written that way, in the present tense, from the perspective of his 9-year-old self. In this podcast, he talks not just about the process of writing Solito but about the necessity of writing it.
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