Don’t miss POETRY OF OUR WORLD at the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival.

July 25 Schedule:

5:00 Prelude interview with Javier and Solmaz

6:00 Solmaz Sharif performs

6:45 Music by Mikata

7:15 Javier Zamora performs

8:00 Book signings

Javier Zamora was born in La Herradura, El Salvador, in 1990. He holds a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied and taught in June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program Zamora earned an MFA from New York University and is currently a 2016–2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He is the recipient of scholarships to the Bread Loaf, Frost Place, Napa Valley, Squaw Valley, and VONA writers’ conferences and fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University (Olive B. O’Connor), MacDowell Colony, Macondo Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Saltonstall Foundation, and Yaddo. In 2016, Barnes & Noble granted him the Writer for Writers Award for his work with the Undocupoets Campaign. He was also the winner of the Ruth Lilly/Dorothy Sargent Fellowship and is a member of the Our Parents’ Bones Campaign, whose goal is to bring justice to the families of the ten thousand disappeared during El Salvador’s civil war.

Solmaz Sharif was born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, Solmaz Sharif holds degrees from U.C. Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, and New York University. Her debut collection LOOK (Graywolf Press) was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award and 2017 PEN Open Book Award. In 2017, Sharif was the recipient of the 27th annual PEN Center USA Literary award in Poetry for LOOK. Sharif has published poetry in the New Republic and Poetry, and has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.

Mikata Salsa and Latin Jazz Orchestra has been delighting audiences around the USA, in Canada and abroad for over 30 years. Recipient of the New Haven Arts Council Award for “outstanding contribution to the cultural life of the community”, and the HPN Latin Music Achievement Award, Mikata has performed at clubs in New York City, (S.O.B.’s, Heart Break, Danceteria, Pyramid Club), at colleges and universities around the country and at concerts and festivals in the US, Canada and Japan.