2024 Intro Journals Project Judges
AWP is honored to introduce Celeste Chan (creative nonfiction), Marcela Fuentes (fiction), and Benin Lemus (poetry) as this year’s judges for the Intro Journals Project. Read their bios below and nominate your students’ work via Submittable by December 1, 2023.
Creative Nonfiction
Celeste Chan: Queer Rebels cofounder, Sister Spit performer, MIX NYC guest curator, Celeste is an incoming Artist in Residence at San Francisco Public Library. She served on Foglifter Journal's board. Celeste facilitated Queer Ancestors Project youth writing workshops, received Bread Loaf's Rona Jaffe scholarship, and was selected as a 2022–23 Catapult Queer/Trans Teaching Fellow. She's published in AWAY, Alta, cream city review, Gertrude, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She's currently researching and writing a hybrid memoir.
Fiction
Marcela Fuentes is a Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer and essayist. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was the 2016–17 James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Indiana Review, The Rumpus, Texas Highways Magazine, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and other journals. Her stories have been anthologized in New Stories from the Southwest, Best of the Web, and Flash Fiction International. Her debut novel MALAS (June 2024) and linked story collection MY HEART HAS MORE ROOMS THAN A WHOREHOUSE are forthcoming from Viking Books.
Poetry
Benin Lemus (she|her) is a poet and an educator based in South Los Angeles. Her debut poetry collection, Dreaming in Mourning (November 2022), is published by World Stage Press. She is a 2022 Inaugural Workshop Fellow with Obsidian Magazine’s O|Sessions: Black Listening—A Performance Master Class and the 2022 Honorable Mention in the Furious Flower Poetry Center’s annual poetry competition. Her work is published online and in print, most recently in Márọkọ́: Journal of African Poetry and TORCH Literary Arts, for which her poetry submission earned a 2022 Pushcart nomination.
