Readings and Talks Featuring Javier Zamora and Natalie Scenters-Zapico

Join us for an evening with poets Javier Zamora and Natalie Scenters-Zapico. This event will be moderated by Carolyn Forché.

Javier Zamora was born in La Herradura, El Salvador in 1990. His father fled El Salvador when he was a year old; and his mother when he was about to turn five. Both parents’ migrations were caused by the US-funded Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992). In 1999, Javier migrated through Guatemala, Mexico, and eventually the Sonoran Desert. After a coyote abandoned his group in Oaxaca, Javier managed to make it to Arizona with the aid of other migrants. His first full-length collection, Unaccompanied (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), explores how immigration and the civil war have impacted his family. Zamora was a 2018-2019 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and holds fellowships from CantoMundo, MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Foundation (Ruth Lilly), Stanford University (Stegner), and Yaddo, among others. He lives in Harlem, NY, where he’s working on a memoir and his second collection of poems, which address the current “immigration crisis.”

Natalie Scenters-Zapico is a poet, educator, and activist from the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, USA and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, México. She is the author of Lima :: Limón (Copper Canyon Press 2019) and The Verging Cities (Colorado State University 2015). Her poems have been published and anthologized in a wide range of nationally and internationally distributed journals including POETRY, The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and Best American Poetry 2015. She is the winner of prestigious awards and fellowships from PEN America, the Great Lakes Colleges’ Association, the Lannan Foundation (2017), CantoMundo (2015), a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation (2018), and was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award (2020), and the International Griffin Poetry Prize (2020). She is an Assistant Professor of poetry at the University of South Florida in Tampa.