JT Torres is a PhD candidate in Educational Psychology at Washington State University. He holds an MFA from Georgia College & State University. This combination of literary practice and research methods has encouraged him to view representation as itself a metaphorical process. In other words, he believes the choices researchers make in transcribing culture is itself a narrative.
His research interests are narrative-based learning, story-telling as a process of identity formation, as well as the relationship between social memory and symbolic literacy within Arará communities in Cuba. He is currently working with Dr. Jill Flanders Crosby, the principle researcher of Secrets Under the Skin. Torres contributes to the project by relying on literary nonfiction strategies to represent a culture that is itself an aesthetic experience. By employing techniques from memoir, research results in a discourse of simulation, in which the the use of metaphor in language becomes a mimesis of the metaphors in religious ritual in Cuba.