Javier Zamora was born in La Herradura, El Salvador, in 1990. His father fled El Salvador when he was just one and his mother when he was about five. Both parents migrated because of the El Salvador Civil War (1980-1992), funded by the United States. In 1999, Javier migrated through Guatemala, Mexico, and the Sonoran Desert. His first poetry collection, No acompañado(“Unaccompanied”), explores how immigration and the civil war affected his family. Zamora was a Radcliffe Fellow (2018-2019) at Harvard University. He has received fellowships from MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation (Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg), Stanford University (Wallace Stegner) and Yaddo. He received the Whiting Award literary fellowship in 2024, as well as the 2017 Lannan and 2016 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, for his work on the Undocupoets Campaign. Javier Zamora currently lives in Tucson, Arizona, where he volunteers for the Salvavision Association.