Telephone: 646.801.4227
J. L. Torres
"I am exploring what it means to live a life yearning for "belongingness’ at a time "when you’re told nation and home are empty concepts, and you have no historical memory of what they ever meant."
J. L. TORRES was born in Cayey, Puerto Rico, and grew up in the South Bronx. Having received his formal education in the States, he returned to Puerto Rico to find his roots and material for his writing. After spending a number of years teaching at the college level, he returned to New York. He has also lived in Madrid, Chicago, Los Angeles, and in Barcelona on a Fulbright Scholarship.
Torres has published The Accidental Native 2013), The Family Terrorist and Other Stories ( 2008). His poetry has appeared in journals such as the Denver Quarterly, the Americas Review, Crab Orchard Review, Bilingual Review, Connecticut Review, Tulane Review, Puerto del Sol, among others. Throughout his career, Torres has freelanced with numerous magazines and newspapers; was managing editor for the popular, but now defunct salsa magazine, Latin NY; and has had one of his stories anthologized in Growing Up Latino (1993). He is working on a story collection about Puerto Ricans and estrangement, and researching a novel based on Puerto Rico’s baseball icon, Roberto Clemente.
Torres holds a PhD from the University of Southern California, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. His MFA thesis was a collection of short stories, Salchichon Soup, some of which have been revised and re-written and included in Family Terrorist. He is Professor Emeritus of English at SUNY Plattsburgh, where he taught American literature, Latina/o Literatures, and Creative Writing, and where he served as the editor of the Saranac Review. Along with Carmen Haydee Rivera, he was the co-editor of Writing Off the Hyphen: New Perspectives on the Literature of the Puerto Rican Diaspora. https://jltorreswriter.com.
Quote: J. L. Torres website.
