Join National Book Award-winning author Justin Torres as he reads from his latest book Blackouts.

Justin Torres has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, The Washington Post, Glimmer Train, Flaunt, and other publications, as well as non-fiction pieces in publications like Best American Essays, The Guardian and The Advocate. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Justin’s novel We the Animals has been translated into fifteen languages and was recently adapted into a film. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for five Independent Spirit Awards. His second novel, Blackouts, won the 2023 National Book Award.

He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library. The National Book Foundation named him one of the 2012’s 5 under 35. He was the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, a Rolón Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award.

This program is supported by CCA's Humanities & Sciences Division Units--MFA Writing, MA Visual & Critical Studies Program, and Critical Ethnic Studies--and by our Provost who works in collaboration with the Queer Cultural Center of San Francisco. Together, CCA's Provost and QCC produce the annual series Queer Conversations on Culture and the Arts; they generously committed funds to tonight's program.