Myriam Gurba is a Mexican-American writer, story-teller, and visual artist from Santa Maria, California. Gurba identifies as queer and as of 2016 lived in Long Beach, California. She is the author of several books, many chapbooks, and various articles, essays and short stories which have been internationally published. In 2019, O, The Oprah Magazine hailed Gurba's work MEAN as one of the "Best LGBTQ Books of All Time". The New York Times has described Gurba as having a "distinct and infectious" voice. Her second book, Painting Their Portraits in Winter: Stories, explores Mexican stories and traditions from a feminist lens.
Career
Gurba toured with Sister Spit, a "lesbian-feminist spoken-word and performance art collective." She read at Radar, Bootleg Theater, Skylight Books, Book Show, Rhapsodomancy, The Poetic Research Bureau, Tongue & Groove, Small Press Fest at Pitzer College, Gallery 211 Booksmith and Charis Books & More. Gurba exhibited at the Museum of Latin American Art and The CenterLong Beach.
Works
Gurba is the author of three books: Mean, Painting Their Portraits in Winter: Stories and Dahlia Season: Stories and a Novella. She wrote the chapbooks: Sweatsuits of the Damned, Menudo & Herb: a little book to reach for during big bowel movements, A White Girl Named Shaquanda: A Chomo Allegory and Trewish Story, River Candy and Wish You Were Me. Gurba's work has been anthologized in Best American Erotica, Bottom's Up, Tough GirlsAmbientes: New Queer Latino Writing and Secrets & Confidences: The Complicated Truth about Women's Friendships. Her poetry appears in Entropy and Everyday Genius. Her prose appears in Time , Colorlines, Les Figues Press, Zocalo Public Square, The Wanderer, figment and XQsi Magazine. Gurba has written a series of essays for The Paris Review, each about a single word: Striking, Salty,Avuncular, as well as an article titled The Mexican Bandit. She contributed an essay, "," for a #MeToo focus of American Book Review. Gurba's review of the book American Dirt sparked controversy about cultural appropriation, the white gaze, racism, #ownvoices, and lack of diversity in the publishing industry.
The New York Times Meghan Daum calls Mean one of the five best memoirs of 2017, writing "Gurba has a voice as distinct and infectious as any I’ve discovered in recent years. “Mean” contains the usual childhood confusions and adolescent humiliations, but it’s also a meditation on race, class, sexuality and the limits of niceness." New York Times Parul Seghal calls Mean “a scalding memoir that comes with a full accounting of the costs of survival, of being haunted by those you could not save and learning to live with their ghosts.” It also “adds a necessary dimension to the discussion of the interplay of race, class and sexuality in sexual violence." Reviews of Gurba's work appear The Iowan Review, The Paris Review,The Lesbrary, Rain Taxi, BIG OTHER and Wing Chair Books. Jill Soloway blurbs for Mean, describing Gurba's voice as, "an alchemy of queer magic feminist wildness, and intersectional explosion." Michelle Tea reviews Mean as a book that mesmerizes with prose, stating that, "there is no other writer like Myriam Gurba and Mean is perfection." Articles about her appears in KQED, The Edge LB and Confessions of a Boy Toy. Interviews with her appear in The Los Angeles Review of Books,OC Weekly, MOLAA, The Normal School, Weird Sister and Otherppl. Playlists for Gurba's writing appear in Largehearted Boy.
