Born and raised in Queens, New York, Christine Kandic Torres is a writer with Puerto Rican and Croatian roots. Her fiction has received support from Hedgebrook, VONA, the Jerome Foundation, and the Queens Council on the Arts, and been featured in publications such as Catapult, Kweli, and Fractured Lit. The Girls in Queens (HarperVia, 2022) is her first novel.
I shoved the lacy bra I kept under my mattress deep into my backpack, sandwiched between my Sequential II textbook and my ancient shared copy of The Iliad, and decided it was time to white out “Brisma + Kelly 4ever” on my Jansport.