For a few years now, Linfield University has provided a space for students and faculty to collaborate on beyond-the-classroom multidisciplinary work on current events and issues. This year, LAB — Learning Across Boundaries – is going full meta: The topic is borders, transitions, and transgressions — defined as broadly as possible.

Which is why this moment — darkened by threats of mass deportations — seems like a perfect one for Salvadoran poet, memoirist, and activist Javier Zamora to drop by and assist with that intellectual project. He appears in a free public event from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Wednesday, May 7, on the McMinnville campus, in the Richard and Lucille Ice Auditorium inside Melrose Hall.

Since the 2022 publication of his Solito: A Memoir, Zamora has had the distinction of being a poet in the national spotlight. The book, published by Penguin Random House imprint Hogarth Press, tells the true story of his crossing the border into the United States from the perspective of his 9-year-old self, which is how old he was in 1999 when he did it. It won positive reviews and became a New York Times bestseller.

Zamora was an accomplished poet more than a decade earlier. In 2014, he was among 36 poets who were awarded fellowships in creative writing by the National Endowment for the Arts, which last weekend landed on President Trump’s list for annihilation. His debut poetry collection, Unaccompanied, was published in 2017 by Copper Canyon Press and also explores borders, politics, and immigration “on a profoundly personal level.”

But the publication of Zamora’s memoir won more publicity. In the past couple of years he’s been featured in the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Democracy Now!, The Nation, The New Yorker, the BBC, Slate, and other major outlets. The book was also Multnomah County Library’s Everybody Reads selection for 2025.

In other words, bringing Zamora to Yamhill County is a “get.”

The evening will feature the author in conversation with Linfield professors Sonia Ticas — whose translation work was the subject of an Oregon ArtsWatch article in 2018 — and Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt, an English professor who heads LAB. A book she edited the year before Solito’s publication also seems especially relevant today: Civility, Free Speech, and Academic Freedom in Higher Education: Faculty on the Margins.

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The two professors and Zamora will take the stage for a wide-ranging conversation about migration, identity, and memory, which will be followed by a book signing. The author reportedly prefers dialogue over lectures, and Dutt-Ballerstadt said questions from the audience will be welcomed.

“I think people like to know a little bit more beyond the book, to the hear author’s own words, and he’s pretty frank about things,” Dutt-Ballerstadt said. “He’s quite the activist, he’s very out there, speaking up about authoritarianism and everything that is going on, so we hope to slip in some questions there to model for students, to show you can talk about difficult subjects.”

This week’s event is the grand finale of sorts for LAB’s current project. Earlier events have been held in-house, but one piece went public last week and is on display in the university’s library. Transitions/Transgressions is a pop-up exhibition featuring literary and visual art work by students from several classes and the campus Spanish Club.

An artists’ reception was held Friday, and the show will be on view through at least May 9,  possibly longer, according to organizers. It’s quite the collection. There are wall hangings and displays, zines, prints, poetry that makes use of found texts, and handmade books with Japanese-style stitching. In total, the show includes about 30 pieces.

Some are expressly and cleverly political — the first such display in Yamhill County since the inauguration, come to think of it. Several of Trump’s executive orders become the template for erasure poetry, in which select lines, words, and paragraphs are blacked out, leaving text of the poet’s choosing that brings out ideas, paradoxes, and hypocrisies that one imagines the original author would loudly object to. Tellingly, these pieces are presented anonymously.

Several short zines are displayed, both in finished form and with the original pages printed out before they’re folded into the publication. I’ve recently heard a few people who work in the humanities say that zines are “coming back” as a sort of rebellion in the style of the Romantic era against high-tech extremes, screens, and AI.

“I think sometimes we really think that the students in our schools are all digitally minded and just on their phones, but they really enjoy making physical objects to interact with and for people to play around with,” said Jesse Donaldson, who teaches creative writing and had his students participate in LAB’s work. “So yeah, zines are part of that.”

That was definitely true for the students in Belle Bezdicek’s bookmaking class, where students were asked to make borders and boundaries the thematic topic of a handmade book.

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“I asked them to interpret borders and boundaries without even thinking of the political aspects of this,” she said. “So, what they did was think about nature versus the city. The visuals are quite extraordinary.”

Students had some wiggle room to use computers if necessary, but Bezdicek said they went all in with working by hand.

“What I’m noticing is that students, this generation, they want analog,” she said. “They’re getting off their phones and looking at the world.”

Noting that her own work in postcolonial studies is, by its very nature, cross-disciplinary, Dutt-Ballerstadt said Zamora’s book, aside from the obvious topic of immigration, is itself the quintessence of crossing the borders of literary genre.

“Take a book like Javier’s,” she said. “Crossing borders. I mean, is it literature? Yes. Is it memoir? Yes. Is it historical? Yes. Is it political? Yes. Is it sociological? Yes. Is it about the psychology of trauma? Yes. A text like that, you can look at it from so many different disciplines.”