In today’s episode, Justin Torres sits down with Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts and David Perez DeHoyos, Library Coordination Manager at Freedom Reads. Torres reads from his novel Blackouts which was shortlisted for the 2025 Inside Literary Prize, the first major US literary prize awarded exclusively by incarcerated judges. Blackouts captures an ongoing conversation between Juan Gay and the narrator, Nene, exploring the suppression of queer history through this dialogue and blackout poems, created by redacting the two volumes of Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns. This is a conversation about re-humanizing in the face of the dehumanization that occurs in places like prison. Torres delves into how life informed his writing and how writing has informed his life, and with characteristic poignancy, he considers the intersection of reading and freedom.
Justin Torres is a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree and the author of two novels, We the Animals and Blackouts. We the Animals won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and was adapted into a feature film. Blackouts won the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Southern California Book Award. Justin was a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, and has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. He is currently an Associate Professor of English at UCLA.
