“Unforgetting is unforgettable… A finely woven tapestry of inheritance, culture and love, this story of Latinidad in the United States is specifically Salvadoreño yet sits in a breathtaking archipelago of communities and histories on and across borders. With marvelous, intimate storytelling Lovato’s coming of age story displaces ugly myths about Central America and its gangs with the truth of what made America, beginning with the ongoing violence of conquest and culminating with the gorgeous repetition of freedom dreams.” — Imani Perry, author of South to America

Roberto Lovato is an award-winning journalist, the author of Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas, and also human rights activist whose career spans over thirty years. His forthcoming book is Letters to a Young Poet Warrior. 

In Unforgetting, Lovato interweaves his father’s complicated history and his own with first-hand reportage on gang life, state violence, and the heart of the immigration crisis in both El Salvador and the US. Lovato’s memoir excavates family history and reveals the intimate stories beneath headlines about gang violence and mass Central American migration, one of the most important, yet least-understood humanitarian crises of our time—and one in which the perspectives of Central Americans in the US have been silenced and forgotten. Unforgetting was shortlisted for the 2022 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and named a “best book of the year” by the LA Times, Newsweek, and The New York Times.

“With raw honesty, Lovato partakes in a much-needed excavation of what it means to be ‘Salvadoran’—and ‘American’—in this world. Unforgetting is an opening, a tear in the cloth, we Salvadorans must speak through.” — Javier Zamora, author of Solito

As an activist, Lovato has served as a strategist for many significant campaigns. He conceived of and designed the Drop the I-Word Campaign (2010), which successfully removed the term “illegal immigrant” and other racist terms from the Associated Press Stylebook and newspapers throughout the country. Dedicated to systemic change, Lovato co-founded the Central American Studies Program at California State University at Northridge and Presente.org, the country’s largest online Latinx organization. All of Lovato’s campaigns fuse traditional storytelling techniques with organizing tools of the digital age.

A recipient of a reporting grant from the Pulitzer Center, Lovato has chronicled some of the most pressing issues facing communities across the US and the rest of the Americas. Lovato’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Guernica, Le Monde Diplomatique, La Opinion, Der Spiegel and other national and international media outlets. Until 2015, he was a fellow at U.C. Berkeley’s Latinx Research Center and recently finished a teaching stint at UCLA. He is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. 

For more information on Roberto Lovato, please visit him on Twitter, Instagram and at robertolovato.com.