Everybody Reads

Everybody Reads 2025 celebrates Javier Zamora’s Solito.

Let’s read, reflect and learn together. Everybody Reads is a community-wide project that promotes shared reading and discussion around a single book. 

How to participate

Read 

Check out Solito from the library, available in Spanish or English. 

Discuss, learn and be inspired

Explore the project guide or check the events calendar for information. From January to March, 2025 you can attend events surrounding the book and its themes.

Everybody Reads will conclude with “An Evening with Javier Zamora” on Tuesday, March 11, 2025 at 7:30 pm at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Tickets are available from Literary Arts.

About the book

Solito is an account of Zamora’s 3,000-mile journey from El Salvador to the United States when he was nine years old. His crossing involved perilous boat trips and relentless desert treks during two life-altering months alongside a group of strangers who became an unexpected family.

He traveled unaccompanied by boat, bus, and foot. After a coyote abandoned his group in Oaxaca, Javier managed to make it to Arizona with the aid of other migrants.

About the author

Javier Zamora was born in La Herradura, El Salvador in 1990. When he was a year old, his father fled El Salvador due to the US-funded Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992). His mother followed her husband in 1995 when Javier was about to turn five. Zamora was left in the care of his grandparents who raised him until he migrated to the US when he was nine. His first poetry collection, Unaccompanied, explores some of these themes.

Everybody Reads 2025, a community reading project of Multnomah County Library, is made possible by gifts to The Library Foundation with the author’s appearance made possible by Literary Arts.