KPL Announces 2025 Reading Together Author
Kalamazoo Public Library is excited to welcome Solito: A Memoir author Javier Zamora to Kalamazoo on Saturday, March 15, 3 pm at Chenery Auditorium. Join us to hear the author’s prepared remarks, followed by an audience Q&A session and book signing opportunity. Copies are available for checkout at all KPL branches and online at kpl.gov. Solito is the selected title for KPL’s 2025 Reading Together Program.
About the Book
A young poet tells the story of his harrowing migration from El Salvador to the United States at the age of nine in this memoir.
Trip. My parents started using that word about a year ago–“one day, you’ll take a trip to be with us. Like an adventure.”
Javier’s adventure is a three-thousand-mile journey from his small town in El Salvador, through Guatemala and Mexico, and across the U.S. border. He will leave behind his beloved aunt and grandparents to reunite with a mother who left four years ago and a father he barely remembers. Traveling alone except for a group of strangers and a coyote hired to lead them to safety, Javier’s trip is supposed to last two short weeks.
At nine years old, all Javier can imagine is rushing into his parents’ arms, snuggling in bed between them, living under the same roof again. He does not see the perilous boat trips, relentless desert treks, pointed guns, arrests and deceptions that await him; nor can he know that those two weeks will expand into two life-altering months alongside a group of strangers who will come to encircle him like an unexpected family.
About the Author
Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador in 1990. His father fled the country when he was one, and his mother when he was about to turn five. Both parents’ migrations were caused by the U.S.-funded Salvadoran Civil War. When he was nine Javier migrated through Guatemala, Mexico, and the Sonoran Desert. His debut poetry collection, Unaccompanied, explores the impact of the war and immigration on his family. Zamora has been a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard and holds fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation.
For more information on the author, please visit www.prhspeakers.com
About Reading Together
When we read together, we grow together.
The Reading Together program helps build a stronger community with deeper connections through the common experience of reading a book and exploring its themes together. When we do that, we find new ways to understand ourselves, each other, and the world around us.
By experiencing the same book, hearing the author speak right here in Kalamazoo, and examining the book’s themes through a local lens, we are able to embrace our similarities and differences from a common point of reference.