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This is DemocracyNow.org, the Warren Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman.

As we continue our conversation with the remarkable poet and writer, Javier Zamora, he is in New York for the Panameraqa Festival to join with other authors and writers to talk about their work.

In part one of our conversation, we talked about immigration policy in this country and about his memoir, Solito, which chronicles his journey as a nine-year-old boy.

Born in El Salvador, going with his grandfather to Mexico after his parents had come to the United States and then moving on without family, traveling from Guatemala through Mexico, across the border into the Sonar and Desert, and finally reuniting with his mother and father who he hadn't seen for years.

His father, a leftist in El Salvador who left the country when he was one year old. He left El Salvador and went to the United States as dissidents in Salvador, as workers in El Salvador were targeted by the US-backed military and right-wing death squads that killed tens of thousands of Salvadorans.

His mother left when he was five. Javier, I thank you for staying with us. You took us on that harrowing journey from your country through Mexico and Guatemala into the United States, reuniting with your parents.

I want to take it from here in part two of our conversation because you grew up as a high school student and a junior high school student in California.

I'd like you to talk about how you became the writer that you have become, the writer and the poet.

You have been a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard, you had fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, but I dare say not many people grew up through the trials, the horror, the near death experiences that you did.

That's what I'd like to talk about now. Talk about being in the United States and how you came to write, who influenced you and take it from there.

Well, after surviving that nine-week journey, surviving the United States as an undocumented person was perhaps the main reason why I became a writer.

It was almost like a chance encounter as an only child and a child of immigrants and an immigrant myself.

My parents always wanted me to be a lawyer, even an accountant or an engineer. To them, I think I just needed to go to college in order to make money.

And so writing was never in the cards for me, but thinking back, this is before Facebook and we were very poor in Osabeler, so we didn't have a phone line.

So our main means of communication with my dad, when my mom was still there, I would write him letters as early as four years old.

And once my mom left, I continued that. And I think that was my practice into my eventual writing life.

But being in this country, you know, it took a chance encounter of a local poet, but the name of Becky Files, to go into my high school and teach us about Pablo Neruda.

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