We the Animals chronicles the coming-of-age of a young, queer, mixed-race narrator growing up with his two brothers in a working-class neighborhood in New York. Torres’ writing, with its familiarity and honesty, brings voice and attention to queer, mixed-race, and low-income narratives that are often omitted from or mistreated within mainstream texts. 

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 nonfiction pieces in publications like the Guardian and the Advocate. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and most recently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.

The National Book Foundation named him one of 2012's 5 Under 35. He has been the recipient of a grant from the National Endownment for the Arts, a Rolón Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. He has taught at Columbia University, Lesley University's Low Residency MFA Program, the 92nd Street Y, and currently teaches at The Writers' Foundry MFA Program at St. Joseph's College.