Javier Zamora and Susan Kiyo Ito on Writing the Story You Have to Write
From the Write-minded Podcast, Hosted by Brooke Warner and Grant Faulkner
Write-minded: Weekly Inspiration for Writers is currently in its fourth year. We are a weekly podcast for writers craving a unique blend of inspiration and real talk about the ups and downs of the writing life. Hosted by Brooke Warner of She Writes and Grant Faulkner of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), each theme-focused episode of Write-minded features an interview with a writer, author, or publishing industry professional.
In this second week of Write-minded’s August mashups, we bring back the heartfelt interviews with Javier Zamora and Susan Kiyo Ito, both of whom spoke so honestly and supportively about writing and sharing stories they’ve carried with them their entire lives. Javier’s harrowing journey from El Salvador to the US border when he was just nine years old, traveling as an unaccompanied minor is the subject of his memoir, Solito, and Susan’s I Would Meet You Anywhere centers her adoption story, touching upon themes of longing, abandonment, identity, and more. Both authors grapple with exposure in these soul-searching stories of identity and survival.
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Javier Zamora migrated to the US as an unaccompanied minor when he was nine years old. His first poetry collection, Unaccompanied, explores some of these themes. His New York Times bestselling memoir,Solito,retells his nine-week odyssey across Guatemala, Mexico, and eventually through the Sonoran Desert. Zamora was a 2018-2019 Radcliffe Fellow and holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University MacDowell, Macondo, the National Endowment for the Arts, and others. Susan Kiyo Ito is the author of the memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere, and a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award. She co-edited the literary anthology A Ghost At Heart’s Edge. Her work has appeared in The Writer, Hyphen, Literary Mama, Catapult, Hyphen,and elsewhere. Her theatrical adaption of Untold, stories of reproductive stigma, was produced at Brava Theater. She teaches at the Mills College campus of Northeastern University.
