Jesús I. Valles

Tow Foundation Playwright in Residence

Jesús I. Valles (they/them) is a queer Mexican immigrant, educator, storyteller, and performer from Cd. Juarez/El Paso. Valles is a 2023 Princess Grace Award recipient and a 2024 Tow Playwright in Residence at The Flea. Jesús is a 2021 CantoMundo fellowship recipient at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, a 2019 Lambda Literary fellow, a 2019 Walter E. Dakin Playwriting Fellow of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a recipient of the 2019 Letras Latinas Scholarship from the Community of Writers’ Poetry Workshop, and a poetry fellow at Idyllwild Arts Writers Week. Jesús is also a 2018 Undocupoets Fellow, a 2018 Tin House Scholar, a fellow of The 2018 Poetry Incubator, and the runner-up in the 2017 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. Their work has been published in The Shade Journal, The Texas Review, The New Republic, Palabritas, The Acentos Review, Quarterly West, The Mississippi Review, Palette, The Adroit Journal, BOAAT, The McNeese Review, and PANK. Their poetry has also been featured on NPR’s Code Switch, The Slowdown, The BreakBeat Poets’ LatiNext Anthology, and the Best New Poets 2020 anthology. As an actor, they are the recipient of four B. Iden Payne Awards, including Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama (2018), and Outstanding Original Script (2018) and they were nominated for the Mark David Cohen New Play Award for their play, (Un)Documents. They most recently starred as Penny Marshall in Victor I. Cazares’ Pinching Pennies with Penny Marshall: Death Rituals for Penny Marshall for New York Theatre Workshop. Jesús was the OUTSider festival’s OUTsider-in-residence and holds an MFA in playwriting from Brown University.