When Jorge set out to write an essay for his Detroit high school’s literary magazine, he wanted something that captured who he was and how he’d grown. He started drafting it in the summer of 2021 and continued tweaking it for the next six months. “I just worked on it every day, really trying to properly represent myself,” Torres says. The resulting essay, “The Book’s Cover,” is a deeply personal and thoughtful piece about feeling torn between two worlds, growing up in the United States in a family of Mexican immigrants. “In America I was too pale for my name, and now I was too pale for my culture,” Torres writes. “I felt that I belonged nowhere, and I began to distance myself from my culture and roots.”
