Jesús I. Valles (they/them) is a queer Mexican immigrant, educator, writer-performer from Cd. Juarez/El Paso. Valles is the winner of the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting International Award (SPREAD), a 2023 Princess Grace Award in Theater, the 2023 Yale Drama Series, selected by Jeremy O. Harris (Bathhouse.pptx), the 2022 Kernodle Playwriting Prize (a river, its mouths), and was named the 2022 Emerging Theatre Professional by the National Theatre Conference. As a playwright, Valles has been produced by INTAR (SPREAD, forthcoming), the Latino Theatre Co. in Los Angeles ((Un)Documents), ZACH Theatre (Una Noche Buena), and The Flea (Bathhouse.pptx), and has received development support from The Bushwick Starr, Clubbed Thumb, The Flea, The Kennedy Center, The Lortel, Manhattan Theatre Club, OUTsider Festival, The Playwrights’ Center, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Teatro Vivo, and The VORTEX. As a poet, Valles received fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, Idyllwild Arts, Lambda Literary, Tin House, and Undocupoets. Valles was a Core Apprentice of the Playwrights’ Center, a writing fellow with The Playwrights Realm, and is currently a member of New Dramatists class of 2031. Additionally, Valles is a 2025 Writing Freed Fellow with Haymarket Books. They received their MFA in writing for performance from Brown University.
- Master of Fine Arts, Brown University, Writing for Performance, Theatre and Performance Studies
- Master of Arts, California State University, Long Beach, Department of Communication Studies
- Bachelor of Arts, University of Texas at El Paso, Major: Communication Studies
- Valles, J. “Gatorade, pepino y limon.” The McNeese Review. 2020 March.
- Valles, J. “Mexican Standard About a Birthplace” & Mexican Standard About a River.” The Adroit Journal. 2020 Jan.
- Valles, J. “Mexican Standard About a Desert.” Palette Poetry. 2019 Dec.
- Valles, J. “If ICE Comes to Your Door.” BOAAT Journal. 2019 Oct.
- Valles, J. “On a Spaceship Somewhere, Long After Empire’s Collapse.” Tin House. 2019 Oct.
- Valles, J. “File Form N-400: START HERE.” The Mississippi Review. 2019 July.
- Valles, J. “After Reading My Bio, The One Where I Tell Her How I Was Brought to This Country, The Agent Says.” Quarterly West. 2019 April.
- Valles, J. “I’d Like To Keep It On Please,” “’apa, lo quiero mucho,” & “ciudadano.” The Acentos Review. 2019 Feb.
- Valles, J. “Stay.” Harvard Palabritas. 1: 64. 2018 Dec.
- Valles, J. “(un)documents.” The New Republic. 2018 Sept.
- Valles, J. “becoming” & “field notes, atx.” The Texas Review. 2018 July.
- Valles, J. “on the uses of another grief as skin, or what to do when well-meaning white queers want to wear your crying.” The Shade Journal. 2016 September.
- Valles-Morales, J. and LeMaster, B. “On Queer of Color Criticism, Communication Studies, and Corporeality.” Kaleidoscope: A Graduate Journal of Qualitative Communication Research: Vol. 14. 2015 December.