Justin Torres

Torres grew up in upstate New York, the son of a Puerto Rican father and a white mother, and studied at Cornell and the Iowa Writers' Workshop before his slim debut novel We the Animals (2011), a ferocious account of three brothers' childhood, brought him wide attention and a film adaptation.

Blackouts (2023) pairs a young gay narrator with a dying older man, Juan Gay, at a strange desert way station, as Juan recounts and revises the real, long-suppressed 1941 study Sex Variants (compiled by the historical researcher Jan Gay, whose own name and work were erased from the published volume), the novel's pages interleaved with redacted archival photographs and blacked-out text; it won the National Book Award.

Torres has taught creative writing at UCLA and continues to write fiction recovering erased queer history, dividing his time between Los Angeles and Brooklyn.