Wikipedia Deep Dive

Justin Torres

8 min read

A single book changed everything for Justin Torres. It was 1994, and City of God by Gil Cuadros gave him the courage to come out as gay. What makes this moment remarkable isn't just the personal revelation—it's what Torres would eventually do with that freedom. Three decades later, he would win the National Book Award for Fiction, one of the most prestigious literary prizes in America.

But between that transformative reading experience and literary stardom lay years of wandering.

The Winding Path to Writing

Torres was born in 1980 to a Puerto Rican father and a mother of Italian and Irish descent. He grew up in Baldwinsville, New York, a small town just outside Syracuse, as the youngest of three brothers. That birth order matters—being the youngest in a household of boys would later inform the perspective of his debut novel.

After high school, Torres enrolled at the State University of New York at Purchase on scholarship. He dropped out quickly. What followed was a period of drift that many writers would recognize: moving from place to place across the country, taking whatever work he could find. He walked dogs. He worked at McNally Jackson, an independent bookstore in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood that has become something of a literary landmark.

The turning point came when a friend invited him to sit in on a creative writing course at The New School. Not as an enrolled student—just as an observer. Something clicked.

That informal exposure led Torres to apply to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, one of the oldest and most competitive graduate writing programs in the United States. He earned his Master of Fine Arts degree there in 2010. From Iowa, he moved to Stanford University as a Stegner Fellow, a two-year writing residency named after Wallace Stegner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who founded the program. The fellowship is extraordinarily selective, accepting only five fiction writers per year from thousands of applicants.

We the Animals

Torres' debut novel arrived in 2011, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. We the Animals runs barely 125 pages, but its impact far exceeded its length.

The book follows three young brothers growing up in upstate New York with a Puerto Rican father and a white mother. Their household runs on chaos and love in unpredictable measures. The prose style is distinctive—lyrical, compressed, often operating more like poetry than traditional fiction. Torres writes in first-person plural for much of the book: "we" rather than "I," capturing how the brothers experience the world as a unit before the narrator gradually separates into his own identity.

Torres has been careful to distinguish the novel from pure autobiography. The "hard facts" mirror his own life, he has said, but it's not memoir. This distinction matters in literary circles. Fiction gives a writer license to shape, rearrange, and invent. Memoir promises a different contract with the reader—one of documentary truth. By choosing fiction, Torres claimed space to tell an emotional truth without being bound to literal events.

The literary world responded with enthusiasm. We the Animals won the First Novelist Award and the Indies Choice Book Award for Adult Debut. It was a finalist for the Edmund White Award—named after the pioneering gay novelist—and received a nomination from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Image Awards in the Outstanding Literary Work category for debut authors.

Salon.com named Torres one of the sexiest men of 2011, an unusual honor for a literary novelist and a sign that his appeal extended beyond the usual book-review pages. The following year, the National Book Foundation selected him for their "5 Under 35" program, identifying him as one of the most promising young fiction writers in America.

From Page to Screen

In 2018, We the Animals became a film. Director Jeremiah Zagar adapted the novel with a visual approach as poetic as Torres' prose. Much of the movie was shot with a handheld camera, creating an intimate, almost documentary feeling despite the clearly artistic composition. The young actors playing the brothers were nonprofessionals discovered through an extensive casting search.

The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, the annual gathering in Park City, Utah, that has launched countless independent films into broader distribution. It won the Next Innovator Prize, an award recognizing formal experimentation and bold creative choices. Critics praised how Zagar translated the book's fragmented, impressionistic style into cinema without simply filming a conventional narrative.

Twelve Years Between Books

Torres' second novel didn't arrive until 2023. Twelve years separated We the Animals from Blackouts.

This gap isn't unusual for literary novelists, though it might surprise readers accustomed to genre fiction's faster publication schedules. Literary writers often spend years between books, teaching, publishing short pieces in magazines, waiting for the next major work to take shape. Torres published short fiction in The New Yorker, Granta, Harper's, Tin House, and Glimmer Train during this period. He wrote essays and criticism for The Advocate, The Guardian, and The Washington Post.

Some of these pieces engaged directly with queer history and politics. "Breaking the Ice: What Russia's Queer Past Has to Tell Us About the Future" appeared in Out magazine in 2013, responding to Russia's escalating anti-gay legislation. "In Praise of Latin Night at the Queer Club" ran in The Washington Post in June 2016, just days after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando that killed 49 people, most of them LGBTQ Latinos.

Blackouts

Blackouts represents a dramatic departure from the slim intensity of We the Animals. The novel is physically larger, more experimental in form, and explicitly engaged with queer history in ways the debut only hinted at.

The book takes as one of its central concerns a real historical document: Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns, published in 1941. This was a scientific study that interviewed gay and lesbian people about their lives, ostensibly in the interest of understanding homosexuality. The researchers' intentions were complex—they weren't simply hostile, but neither were they allies in any modern sense. The study documented queer lives in a period when such documentation was rare, but it also pathologized those lives, treating homosexuality as a condition to be analyzed and, ideally, prevented.

Torres' novel grapples with this document and its subjects. What happens to people who become data points in someone else's study? How do queer people make themselves visible in cultures that would prefer they remain invisible? What gets blacked out—literally, in terms of censored documents, and figuratively, in terms of suppressed histories?

The form of the novel reflects these questions. Torres incorporates images, documents, and experimental typography. The book doesn't move in a straight line. It circles, fragments, reassembles.

The National Book Award judges responded to this ambition. In November 2023, Blackouts won the National Book Award for Fiction, one of the two or three most important literary prizes in the United States. The award recognized both the novel's artistic achievement and its historical significance—its insistence on recovering and reckoning with queer history.

Recognition continued into 2024. The novel was shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. In 2025, it made the longlist for the International Dublin Literary Award, an international prize that draws nominations from public libraries around the world.

Teaching and Recognition

Torres currently teaches as an associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. This represents a complete transformation from his days walking dogs and working retail—though writers often note that such early jobs provide invaluable material. Torres' New Yorker essay "Dog-Walking for a Wealthy Narcissist" mined exactly that period of his life.

Before UCLA, Torres held visiting positions including the Picador Guest Professorship at the University of Leipzig in Germany during the summer of 2016. He has received a Rolón Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists, which provides unrestricted funding to artists across disciplines.

In 2024, Torres received a Guggenheim Fellowship, joining a list of recipients that stretches back nearly a century. The Guggenheim Foundation has supported writers including Saul Bellow, Flannery O'Connor, and Langston Hughes. The fellowship provides financial support for artists and scholars to pursue ambitious projects.

The Shape of a Career

What emerges from Torres' biography is a particular kind of literary trajectory—one that's become rarer in an era of constant content production. He has published two novels in roughly fifteen years. Both have won major prizes. Neither feels rushed or opportunistic.

This stands in contrast to how many contemporary writers are advised to build careers: publish frequently, maintain social media presence, treat writing as content. Torres seems to work differently, taking whatever time the work requires.

His essays and short fiction suggest the range of his interests: queer history and politics, questions of visibility and erasure, the experience of growing up working-class and multiracial in America. But the novels remain the center. Each one arrives as an event rather than another entry in a catalog.

At forty-four, Torres likely has decades of writing ahead of him. If the pattern holds, readers may be waiting years for the next novel. Based on what he's produced so far, it will probably be worth the wait.