J.L. Torres is the author of the collection of short stories, The Family Terrorist and other Stories (Arte Publico, 2008) and the novel, The Accidental Native (2013). He has published stories in Hayden's Ferry Review, the Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review, and the anthology, Growing Up Latino. Various poems in journals such as the North American Review, Denver Quarterly, the Americas Review, Crab Orchard Review, Bilingual Review, Connecticut Review, Tulane Review, Puerto del Sol, among others, most of which are in Boricua Passport (2Leaf Press, 2014). His second story collection, Migrations, won the inaugural Tomas Rivera Book prize (Judge: Luis Alberto Urrea), sponsored by University of California, Riverside, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. The collection was released by LARB Books on June 1, 2021. He recently completed a novella, Clemente Between the Worlds, based on Puerto Rico's baseball icon, Roberto Clemente and is in the process of submittimng it to several presses, contests and agents.
He is Professor Emeritus of English at SUNY Plattsburgh, where he taught American literature, Latina/o Literatures, and Creative Writing. He co-founded the Saranac Review and served as its Editor for many years. Along with Carmen Haydee Rivera, he is the co-editor of Writing Off the Hyphen: New Perspectives on the Literature of the Puerto Rican Diaspora. He lives in Plattsburgh, New York--known to friends and relatives as "carajo county"--with his wife and two sons, and a lot of snow. He has no known hobbies, has never been in prison, has never trafficked drugs or pimped. Although raised in the heart of the South Bronx he did not belong to any gang unless you consider longtime friends as such. He has never had quirky and funky jobs, and is notoriously inept with tools.
