{"href":"https://api.simplecast.com/oembed?url=https%3A%2F%2Fthe-freedom-takes.simplecast.com%2Fepisodes%2Finside-literary-prize-2025-justin-torres-Mw3Jdyt4","width":444,"version":"1.0","type":"rich","title":"Inside Literary Prize 2025: Justin Torres ","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_url":"https://image.simplecastcdn.com/images/ac6133f3-8afa-4ecd-a499-1677ca2d77d9/fd06e8a3-16f4-4c7d-b943-76b3571af73f/freedom-20takes-203000-c3-973000-2025-06-19.jpg","thumbnail_height":300,"provider_url":"https://simplecast.com","provider_name":"Simplecast","html":"<iframe src=\"https://player.simplecast.com/99147fd8-195d-495b-b604-f12916abff57\" height=\"200\" width=\"100%\" title=\"Inside Literary Prize 2025: Justin Torres \" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"></iframe>","height":200,"description":"In today’s episode, Justin Torres sits down with Freedom Reads Founder & CEO Reginald Dwayne Betts and David Perez DeHoyos, Library Coordination Manager at Freedom Reads. Torres reads from his novel Blackouts which was shortlisted for the 2025 Inside Literary Prize, the first major US literary prize awarded exclusively by incarcerated judges. Blackouts captures an ongoing conversation between Juan Gay and the narrator, Nene, exploring the suppression of queer history through this dialogue and blackout poems, created by redacting the two volumes of Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns. This is a conversation about re-humanizing in the face of the dehumanization that occurs in places like prison. Torres delves into how life informed his writing and how writing has informed his life, and with characteristic poignancy, he considers the intersection of reading and freedom.\n"}