Amanda Torres

Amanda Torres (AT) is a queer, Mexican-American writer, educator, and cultural organizer living in Massachusetts. AT has been performing and teaching writing for eighteen years throughout the Midwest and Northeast as well as the UK. The former program director of the Poetry Foundation’s National Incubator for Community Engaged Poets, as well as the co-founder and former director of MassLEAP, a youth literary organization in Boston, they are a designer and curator of justice-oriented, arts-based learning spaces. In the classroom, AT creates radical, imaginative, and care-centered labs for creativity, self-reflection, and the navigation of power with/in institutions & relationship. Their artistry is a lovingly made, and often collaborative, ofrenda to their ancestors and a belief in the strange and the tender. Their writing can be found in print in LatiNext, a Breakbeat Poetry Anthology and At Our Best: Building Youth-Adult Partnerships in Out-of-School Time Settings. AT received their M.Ed from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2021. They currently work as a freelance editor, curriculum developer, and teaching fellow at their alma mater and are working on a poetry manuscript in which they hope to write the people they love into the future.