Javier Zamora
Javier Zamora is a Salvadoran poet and activist. Early life. Zamora was born in San Luis La Herradura, El Salvador and immigrated to the United States at the age of nine, joining his parents in California. Education. He earned a BA at the University of California, Berkeley and an MFA at New York University and was a 2016–2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Career. Zamora's chapbook "Nueve Años Inmigrantes/Nine Immigrant Years" won the 2011 Organic Weapon Arts Contest, and his first poetry collection, "Unaccompanied", was published in 2017 by Copper Canyon Press. His poetry can  be found in "American Poetry Review", "Best New Poets 2013", "Kenyon Review", "Narrative" Magazine, "The New Republic", "The New York Times", "Ploughshares", and "Poetry". Honors. Zamora's honors include Barnes & Noble Writer for Writer's Award (2016), Meridian Editors’ Prize, and the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Zamora has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, CantoMundo, Colgate University, The Frost Place, MacDowell Colony, The Macondo Writers Workshop, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Creative Writing, and Yaddo. In 2017, Zamora was awarded the  Narrative Prize for "Sonoran Song," "To the President-Elect," and "Thoughts on the Anniversary of My Crossing the Sonoran Desert". Activism. Zamora was a founder, with poets Marcelo Hernandez Castillo and Christopher Soto (AKA Loma), of the Undocupoets campaign which eliminated citizenship requirements from major first poetry book prizes in the United States.