Myriam Gurba
Myriam Gurba (born 1976 or 1977 in Santa Maria, California) is an American writer, critic, and visual artist. She wrote the memoir Mean (2017) and the essay collection Creep: Accusations and Confessions (2023). Mean was named by The New York Times as one of the best memoirs of 2017 and was listed by Oprah Magazine among the Best LGBTQ Books Ever. Creep was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism and won the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction.
In 2019 Gurba’s review of Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt, published in Tropics of Meta, went viral and sparked national debate about race and publishing. She helped co-found #DignidadLiteraria, a campaign pushing for more Latinx writers in publishing.
Gurba began her career in queer publishing. After UC Berkeley, she worked for On Our Backs, a lesbian erotic magazine. She toured the United States with Sister Spit, a queer feminist literary and performance group, in 2011 and 2015. She has shown art at the Museum of Latin American Art and The Center Long Beach.
Her books also include Dahlia Season (2007), Painting Their Portraits in Winter (stories), and various chapbooks. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Tasteful Rude, an online magazine about art, culture, and politics, and has written for Time, The Paris Review, Believer, ColorLines, and other outlets.
Gurba hosts AskBiGrlz, a Q&A podcast with MariNaomi, since 2017. Her debut novel Dahlia Season won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and was a Lambda finalist. Mean received strong praise from critics, and Creep won the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction. Gurba identifies as queer and bisexual and has lived in Long Beach, California.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 14:25 (CET).