We are so excited to start working with author and professor J.L. Torres.

Professor J. L. Torres is the author of The Family Terrorist and Other Stories; a novel, The Accidental Native; and the collection of poetry, Boricua Passport. He has published stories and poems in numerous journals and magazines, including the North American Review, Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Eckleburg Review, Puerto del Sol, Las Americas Review, and the anthology Growing Up Latino.

Born in Puerto Rico, raised in the South Bronx, he lives in Plattsburgh, New York, where he teaches American literature, US ethnic literatures, and creative writing at the SUNY campus there. Besides the Ph.D., he holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University.

Professor Torres’ new book, Migrations, a short story collection deeply embedded in the history of Puerto Rico, which won the Tomás Rivera Book Prize, is forthcoming with the Los Angeles Review of Books on May 30, 2021.

Winner of the inaugural Tomás Rivera Book Prize

A ‘sucio’ goes to an underground clinic for therapy to end his machista ways and is accidentally transitioned. Ex-gangbangers gone straight deal with a troubled, gifted son drawn to the gangsta lifestyle promoted by an emerging music called hip hop. Dead and stuck “between somewhere and nowhere,” Roberto Clemente, the great Puerto Rican baseball icon, soon confronts the reason for his predicament. These are a few of the characters in Professor J.L. Torres’s second story collection, Migrations, the inaugural winner of the Tomás Rivera Book Prize.

These stories take us inside the lives of self-exiles, unhomed and unhinged people, estranged from loved ones, family, culture, and collective history. Despite the effects of colonization of the body and mind, Puerto Ricans have survived beyond geography and form an integral part of the American mosaic.