Justin Torres grew up in Baldwinsville, New York, as the youngest of three boys. His father is Puerto Rican and his mother is of Italian and Irish descent. His first novel, We The Animals, based on his childhood, received wide praise. After enrolling in and dropping out of SUNY Purchase and working odd jobs across the United States for several years, a friend invited Torres to sit in on a fiction writing class at the New School. This experience prompted him to start writing seriously. Torres earned his MFA in fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, then went on to earn a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. His fiction has been published widely in prestigious publications like The New Yorker, Granta, and Harper's. He teaches English at UCLA.
Blackouts was published in 2023 and was the winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.
The novel Blackouts explores queer history through the memories of two men in a mentor-mentee relationship. Juan and nene discuss their experiences as gay men and Juan tells nene about Jan Gay and the Sex Variants book that co-opted her research...
We the Animals is author Justin Torres' debut novel. Released in 2011, the novel tells the story of three brothers of mixed race as they live their rough lives rural upstate New York throughout the 1980s. Although it primarily focuses on one of...
