Torres's novel We the Animals has been translated into fifteen languages and was recently adapted into a film. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for five Indpendent Spirit Awards. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford Univeristy, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library. The National Book Foundation named him one of the 2012's 5 under 35. He was a recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Rolón Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, He lives in Los Angeles, where he is an Assistant Professor of English at UCLA.