JUSTIN TORRES is the author of Blackouts, which won the National Book Award for Fiction and the California Book Award, and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Lambda Literary award, the Inside Literary Prize, and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. A 2025 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy, he’s also received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. His first novel, We the Animals was a national bestseller and adapted into a feature film. He lives Los Angeles, and is a professor of English at UCLA.