Valerie Nies is a comedian, writer, and gluten enthusiast living in Austin, Texas. She's written for humor sites McSweeney's, Reductress, The Belladonna, Robot Butt, and Slackjaw, and her sketches have been featured on Jezebel, Bitch, Salon, Huffington Post, and Grub Street. She’s won awards for sitcom pilots and spec scripts that never aired, wrote an award-winning one-woman show about the book Attached, and hosted the frequently sold out stand-up show Smile More in Austin for 4 years. She’s also encourages others to find the courage to perform stand-up comedy through teaching performance and joke-writing classes at Merlin Works in Austin, Texas, and online through Ether Comedy. Valerie is also a published poet with work appearing in Rattle, Drunk Monkeys, Hash Journal, Olney Magazine, and Anti-Heroin Chic, among many other outlets. Her chapbook, Imaginary Frenemies, was published in 2021 from Toho and her first full-length collection is forthcoming in 2022 from World Stage Press. She spends a good deal of her free time scanning WebMD and ridding her clothing of cat fur.