

American Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author of Solito
Imagine being nine years old, handed to a stranger, and told you’ll see your parents in two weeks. That is where Javier Zamora’s New York Times bestselling memoir Solito begins, and it’s why readers cannot put it down.
Solito has been hailed as a new landmark in the literature of migration, winning the 2023 American Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, and the ALA Alex Award. It was longlisted for the PEN America Literary Awards and named to multiple best-of-the-year lists.
The book follows Zamora’s journey alone from El Salvador through Guatemala and Mexico to reunite with his parents in the United States. What should have taken two weeks stretched into two months of perilous boat trips, desert treks, arrests, and betrayals. Through it all, he found unexpected kindness from the strangers who became his family.
Zamora is also a celebrated poet, and his debut collection, Unaccompanied, was praised for its vivid rendering of a childhood shaped by war and migration. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, and Poetry.
A tireless advocate, Zamora cofounded Undocupoets in 2015 and helped end citizenship-based barriers in poetry publishing. He holds degrees from UC Berkeley and NYU, and lives in Tucson, Arizona.
Solito is an important campus and community read across the country, reminding audiences that migration is a story about family: the one we’re born into and the one we make along the way.
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