Javier Zamora
“When the walls caved in around me (in a cell), or when I was walking in the desert, it was the sky that kept me going. The expansive blue seemed endless with possibilities. And when there were clouds, the clouds were signs of hope. I chose my phrase, “ARRIBA EL ANIMO,” to place our gaze back up on that hopeful space. The message is specifically for those on the inside—if they’re fortunate enough to be by a window, or if they’re outside when it is written. It means that the “cheer,” “high spirits,” “change,” “possibility,” “good news,” are just above the earth, but not as unattainable as we may think—literally shown by the phrase being written in the sky. But it’s also for those on the outside, on both sides of the border, on both sides of “legality,” to remind us to keep fighting for a better world.”
BIO
Javier Zamora's first full-length collection, Unaccompanied (Copper Canyon Press, September 2017), explores how immigration and the civil war have impacted his family. Zamora (b. 1990 La Herradura, El Salvador) was a 2018-2019 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University (Olive B. O’Connor), MacDowell, Macondo, the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Foundation (Ruth Lilly), Stanford University (Stegner), and Yaddo. Javier Zamora lives in Harlem, NY, where he is working on a memoir and his second collection of poems, which address the current “immigration crisis.”