At 9, Javier Zamora walked 4,000 miles to the US. At 29, he was ready to tell the story

Javier Zamora hadn't yet learned to tie his shoes when he began a 4,000-mile journey in 1999.

He was a 9-year-old boy living in El Salvador with his grandparents before he embarked, unaccompanied, on a cross-border trip to reunite with his parents in the United States. What was supposed to be a two-week journey turned into a harrowing two-month trek through Guatemala, Mexico and Arizona.

Nearly two decades later, Zamora thought he had healed from the trauma of his immigration experience. He had published his first poetry collection, "Unaccompanied" — transformed some of those memories into art. He was getting paid to write for the first time. He had a green card. He was a fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

But he was the most unhappy he'd ever been. "I was drinking heavily, destroying my body, doing drugs, sex," he recalled recently. So he started writing again, forcing himself to remember