Celeste Pewter is a former political staffer and political strategist, with two decades of experience in Democratic politics. She currently works for a Washington D.C. think tank.

Celeste has bylines in CNN, Teen Vogue, Marie Claire and Thrillist. Her Halloween essay for Thrillist was submitted for the Beard Award in 2019, and her CNN and Teen Vogue essays on Vincent Chin were shared widely, as Stop AAPI Hate started gaining prominence. Her speeches for elected officials have been featured in national publications.

Celeste was featured on the Asian-American Journalist Association’s (AAJA) inaugural list of 100 journalists and subject-matter experts, and is a working journalist.

She has an MA in War Studies from King’s College London, a joint MA in Global Security and Intelligence from Johns Hopkins University, and a language certificate from Princeton University. She was a semi-finalist for the Presidential Management Fellowship in 2023, and is currently a fellow with the University of Bath’s Institute for Policy Research. She was nominated for a GAIN Powerful IDEA Award for Transformational Talent and Leadership in 2023.

When she’s not writing press releases or trying to make a TikTok about foreign trade entertaining, Celeste is probably being conned by her three cats for food.