Spread Written and Directed by Jesús I. Valles Performances: 3/16 8 PM 3/17 1 PM 3/18 8 PM 3/19 1 PM Leeds Theatre 83 Waterman Street, Providence RI 02912 click here for tickets Take some dry ramen and throw it in a plastic bag. Add Hot Cheetos, beef jerky bits, beans, Hot Fries, and hot water. Mayonnaise or mustard (if you like that shit). Let it sit. Enjoy. Anything can be lunch in 9th grade. Anything can be anything. Jeffrey, Andrew, Chris, and Jordan are 9th grade boys and they’re trying their absolute best, and the thing about 9th grade is nobody knows what they’re doing. Here they are, at lunch. Here they are, at home. Here they are, together, in 9th grade, hoping they’ll get through it.
Jesús I. Valles (they/them) is a queer Mexican immigrant, educator, storyteller, and performer from Cd. Juarez/El Paso. 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 is currently OUTSider festival’s OUTsider-in-residence and an MFA playwriting student at Brown University.