Justin Torres

Justin Torres was born in New York City but grew up in upstate New York in a town called Baldwinsville. The youngest of three brothers, he is of Puerto Rican descent and came out as gay when he was a teenager, an experience he writes about in his debut novel, We The Animals, which is semi-autobiographical. He attended New York University as a young man, though he soon dropped out and traveled around the United States. During this period, he worked odd jobs before sitting in on a writing class at The New School back in New York City. After this experience, he decided to concentrate on his writing. He subsequently attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, receiving his Masters in Fine Arts in 2010, at which point he became a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. It was during this time that he published We The Animals, which won an Indies Choice Book Award and was a finalist for a Publishing Triangle Award and an NAACP Image Award. He now teaches in the English department at the University of California, Los Angeles.