Javier Zamora & Ly Tran With Maria Hinojosa: A Conversation

Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador in 1990. Escaping the U.S.-funded Salvadoran Civil War, his father fled the country when he was 1, and his mother when he was about to turn 5. His debut poetry collection, Unaccompanied, explores the impact of the war and immigration on his family. He also wrote the chapbook Nueve Años Inmigrantes/Nine Immigrant Years. His poetry has been featured in Best New Poets 2013 and has appeared in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, and elsewhere. “One day, you’ll take a trip to be with us. Like an adventure,” Zamora recalls his parents telling him. That adventure would be a 3,000-mile journey from his small town in El Salvador, through Guatemala and Mexico and across the U.S. border. Traveling alone amid a group of strangers and a “coyote” hired to lead them to safety, Javier expects his trip to last two short weeks. It lasts two life-altering months, alongside fellow migrants who will come to encircle him like an unexpected family. In Solito: A Memoir (Hogarth), Zamora writes about the treacherous and near-impossible journey, and the miraculous kindness and love delivered at the most unexpected moments.

Ly Tran graduated from Columbia University in 2014 with a degree in creative writing and linguistics. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Art Omi, and Yaddo. House of Sticks: A Memoir (Scribner) is her first book. Tran is just a toddler in 1993 when she and her family immigrate from a small town along the Mekong river in Vietnam to a two-bedroom railroad apartment in the New York borough of Queens. Her father, a former lieutenant in the South Vietnamese army, spent nearly a decade as a POW and resettled through a humanitarian program run by the U.S. government. Soon after they arrive, she joins her parents and three older brothers in sewing ties and cummerbunds on their living room floor to make ends meet, working long hours at home and later as a manicurist alongside her mother at a nail salon. At school, Tran feels the mounting pressure to blend in. But she can’t see the blackboard, and her father – imagining a government conspiracy – forbids her from getting glasses. House of Sticks is a coming-of-age tale set against clashing cultural expectations, and a work that NPR called “an unsentimental yet deeply moving examination of filial bond, displacement, war trauma, and poverty.”

Maria Hinojosa’s nearly 30-year career as a journalist includes reporting for PBS, CBS, WGBH, WNBC, CNN, and NPR, as well as anchoring and executive producing the Peabody Award-winning show Latino USA, distributed by NPR. She is also the founding co-anchor of the political podcast In The Thick and the founder of Futuro Media, an independent nonprofit organization with the mission of producing multimedia content from a Person of Color perspective. Before all her awards and achievements, Hinojosa was “a girl with big hair and even bigger dreams.” Born in Mexico and raised in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, she was always looking for ways to better understand the world around her – and where she fit in. In Once I Was You – Adapted for Young Readers: Finding My Voice and Passing the Mic (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers), a special adaptation of her 2020 2020 memoir for young readers, she combines stories from her life with observations about the United States’ complicated attitudes toward the people who cross its borders, by choice or by force.