Justin Torres + Angela Flournoy | PEN Presents

PEN America Los Angeles is delighted to present beloved author Justin Torres upon the release of his new novel, Blackouts. This hybrid text is a collage of vignettes, image, and blackout poetry born from a true artifact, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns. Ekphrastic and archival, Torres pieces together the fictional histories of the narrator and his peer, “playful raconteur” Juan Gay, as well as the real-life creator of Sex Variants, Jan Gay, a woman whose scholarship was historically co-opted. Join us for a conversation about authorship, the art of fiction, and the possibilities of the novel. 

This free program will be followed by Q+A and a book signing.

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Justin Torres is the author of We the Animals, which won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, was translated into fifteen languages, and was adapted into a feature film. He was named a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35,” a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library.

Angela Flournoy is the author of The Turner House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. The novel won the VCU Cabell First Novel Prize and was also a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and an NAACP Image Award. She is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, and her nonfiction has appeared in many publications, including The Nation, The Los Angeles Times and The New Yorker.

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