2026-27 COMmon Read: Solito by Javier Zamora
- Who: You, everyone at COM, and Javier Zamora
- What: COM's shared reading program featuring a memoir and poetry by Javier Zamora
- Where: All over both campuses and the community. Stay tuned for related events
- When: August 2026 - May 2027
- Why this memoir? Why now? Reading helps us process complex feelings and experiences, and it teaches empathy.
Join us for a year-long celebration of immigration stories! This year's COMmon Read will focus on Solito: A Memoir by Javier Zamora. The library has copies of Solito in English and Spanish to be used by faculty to teach and given freely to students and employees across the college.
Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador in 1990. His father fled the country when he was one, and his mother when he was about to turn five. Both parents’ migrations were caused by the U.S.-funded Salvadoran Civil War. When he was nine Javier migrated through Guatemala, Mexico, and the Sonoran Desert. Solito shares Javier's three-thousand-mile journey. A memoir as gripping as it is moving, Solito provides an immediate and intimate account not only of a treacherous and near-impossible journey, but also of the miraculous kindness and love delivered at the most unexpected moments. Solito is Javier Zamora’s story, but it’s also the story of millions of others who had no choice but to leave home. This book, which is a New York Times bestseller, is especially meaningful for College of Marin because Javier grew up in San Rafael and his parents were COM students.
Javier Zamora's debut poetry collection, Unaccompanied, explores the impact of the war and immigration on his family.
Zamora has been a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard and holds fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation.
Needed: actors, designers, writers, filmmakers!
Help create an original play in response to Solito. Students will explore the past 100 years of immigration in our community, develop the script in the fall, and rehearse and perform it in the spring, including a performance in front of Javier on May 6. Then in summer of 2027, the plan is to take the show to the Hollywood Fringe Festival and to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. No experience required! Contact Erin Africa at [email protected]
Save the Date!
Javier Zamora is coming to COM on Thursday, May 6, 2027! Read his memoir now to start connecting!
Thursday, May 6, 2027
5 pm to 8 pm
James Dunn Theatre
Performing Arts Building
Kentfield Campus
College of Marin
Learn more about COMmon Read
and find copies of the books, online or in print!
Photograph by Gerardo del Valle