Justin Torres

Justin Torres (born 1980) is an American novelist and an Associate Professor of English at University of California, Los Angeles. He won the First Novelist Award for his semi-autobiographical debut novel We the Animals (2011), which was also a Publishing Triangle Award finalist and a NAACP Image Award nominee. The novel has been adapted into a film of the same title and was awarded the Next Innovator Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Torres' second novel, Blackouts, won the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction.

Early life
Justin Torres was born to a father of Puerto Rican descent and a mother of Italian and Irish descent. He was raised in Baldwinsville, New York, as the youngest of three brothers. Although his novel We the Animals is not an autobiography, Torres has said that the "hard facts" in the novel mirror his own life. City of God by Gil Cuadros, published in 1994, reportedly helped him to come out as gay. After leaving his family home, Torres attended SUNY Purchase on scholarship but quickly dropped out. He spent a few years of moving around in the country and taking whatever job came, until a friend invited him to sit in a writing course taught at The New School, which motivated him to start writing seriously.

Career
In 2010, Torres received his master's degree from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He was a 2010–2012 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He was a recipient of the Rolón Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists. In the summer of 2016, Torres was the Picador Guest Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig's Institute for American Studies in Leipzig, Germany. He was a former dog walker and a former employee of McNally Jackson, a bookstore in Manhattan. Torres is currently an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.

He has published short fiction for The New Yorker, Granta, Harper's, Tin House, Glimmer Train, The Washington Post, and other publications, as well as non-fiction for The Advocate and The Guardian.

A film adaptation of We The Animals, directed by Jeremiah Zagar, premiered in 2018 at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Next Innovator Prize.

Awards and honors
Torres' first novel, We the Animals (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), won an Indies Choice Book Awards (Adult Debut Honor Award) and was also a Publishing Triangle Award finalist and a NAACP Image Award nominee (Outstanding Literary Work, Debut Author). The novel also won the 2012 First Novelist Award.

Torres was named by Salon.com as one of the sexiest men of 2011. In 2012, the National Book Foundation named him among their  5 under 35 young fiction writers.

His 2023 novel Blackouts, a historical fiction, dealing with queer identity and historical suppression of LGBT culture, won the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction and the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.

Torres received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2024.

Short stories

 * "Dark Mother", in Dismantle: an anthology of writing from the VONA/Voices Writing Workshop(with contributors including Junot Díaz, Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela, Andrea Walls, Adriana Castro Ramírez, Camille Acker, Marco Fernando Navarro). Philadelphia, PA. ISBN 0-9897474-1-7, May 1, 2014.
 * "Dark Mother", in Dismantle: an anthology of writing from the VONA/Voices Writing Workshop(with contributors including Junot Díaz, Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela, Andrea Walls, Adriana Castro Ramírez, Camille Acker, Marco Fernando Navarro). Philadelphia, PA. ISBN 0-9897474-1-7, May 1, 2014.
 * "Dark Mother", in Dismantle: an anthology of writing from the VONA/Voices Writing Workshop(with contributors including Junot Díaz, Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela, Andrea Walls, Adriana Castro Ramírez, Camille Acker, Marco Fernando Navarro). Philadelphia, PA. ISBN 0-9897474-1-7, May 1, 2014.
 * "Dark Mother", in Dismantle: an anthology of writing from the VONA/Voices Writing Workshop(with contributors including Junot Díaz, Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela, Andrea Walls, Adriana Castro Ramírez, Camille Acker, Marco Fernando Navarro). Philadelphia, PA. ISBN 0-9897474-1-7, May 1, 2014.
 * "Dark Mother", in Dismantle: an anthology of writing from the VONA/Voices Writing Workshop(with contributors including Junot Díaz, Marissa Johnson-Valenzuela, Andrea Walls, Adriana Castro Ramírez, Camille Acker, Marco Fernando Navarro). Philadelphia, PA. ISBN 0-9897474-1-7, May 1, 2014.