MYRIAM GURBA
Myriam Gurba has lived in California her entire life, with its plants and soils, forests and ecology, immersing herself in the language of the landscape as refracted through the languages and memories of her ancestors.
In Poppy State, California plants serve as structural anchors in a wildly inventive work of narrative nonfiction that is part botanical criticism, part personal storytelling, and part study of place.
The most fearless writer in America.
Luis Alberto Urrea
The mother of intersectional Latinx identity.
Cosmopolitan
One of our great American intellectuals.
Los Angeles Times
Myriam Gurba is the author of four books, including Dahlia Season (2007) which won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, Painting their Portraits in Winter (2015; Mean (2017), a true crime memoir that was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction, and the PEN America Award for Creative Nonfiction; and Creep: Accusations and Confessions, her first essay collection, which includes her viral essay, “Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck: My Bronca with Fake Ass Social Justice Literature,” and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism.
Gurba’s writing been widely anthologized and has also appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Believer, Paris Review, and TIME. She is also a teacher, editor, anti-rape activist, public speaker, practitioner of plant-based magic, and a co-founder of Dignidad Literaria, a grassroots organization that combats white supremacy in the publishing industry.
