Myriam Gurba

Myriam Gurba Serrano (born May 14, 1977) is an American author, editor, and visual artist.

She is best known for her true crime memoir, Mean, and her review, in Tropics of Meta, of American Dirt. She is a co-founder of the grassroots campaign #DignidadLiteraria (Literary Dignity) which seeks to provide "greater inclusion of Chicanx and Latinx authors, editors, and executives, and to combat the exclusion and erasure of Latinx and Chicanx literature within the publishing industry in the USA.”

Career
Gurba's literary career began in the queer publishing industry. Her first job after graduating from the University of California, Berkeley was at On Our Backs magazine, a lesbian erotic magazine "made by lesbians for lesbians". She toured the United States with Sister Spit, a "lesbian-feminist spoken-word and performance art collective" in 2011 and 2015.

She has exhibited art works at the Museum of Latin American Art and The Center Long Beach.

Works
Gurba is the author of Creep: Accusations and Confessions (Avid Reader Press, 2023), Mean (Coffee House Press, 2017), Dahlia Season: Stories and a Novella (Manic D Press/Future Tense, 2007), and Painting Their Portraits in Winter: Stories which explores Mexican stories and traditions through a feminist lens. She is also the author of various chapbooks including Wish You Were Me (Future Tense Books, 2011), Sweatsuits of the Damned (RADAR Productions, 2013), and River Candy (eohippus labs, 2015).

Gurba is the Editor-in-Chief of Tasteful Rude, an online magazine published by The Brick House Cooperative. Tasteful Rude showcases "criticism, analysis, and commentary about [...] art, culture, technology, religion, [and] politics".

She has written for Time, The Paris Review, American Book Review, ColorLines, and Believer Magazine.

Gurba's review of the book American Dirt in Tropics of Meta sparked controversy about cultural appropriation, the white gaze, racism, #ownvoices, and lack of diversity in the publishing industry. The review for Tropics of Meta was written after a previous review, commissioned by Ms. Magazine, was rejected for being too negative. Gurba's review, along with the hashtag #DignidadLiteraria, went viral in early 2020.

Since 2017, she and fellow author MariNaomi have been hosting an advice podcast called AskBiGrlz where they answer listener questions.

Awards
Gurba's debut novel Dahlia Season won The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction from Publishing Triangle, and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Dazed ranked Dahlia Season among their list of queer lit classics. Emily Gould described Gurba as "a new writer for the first time whose voice is different from any you've heard before and who you want to keep hearing forever." Gurba's third book Mean was a finalist for the Judy Grahn Award in 2018. Her fourth book Creep was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for criticism and was shortlisted for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction. Her chapbook, Sweatsuits of the Damned, won the Eli Coppola Memorial Chapbook Prize in 2013.

Reception
In 2019, O, The Oprah Magazine called Gurba's work Mean (2017) one of the "Best LGBTQ Books of All Time". In The New York Times, literary critic Parul Sehgal described Mean as a "scalding memoir" and Gurba as having a "distinct and infectious" voice.

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 Sehgal 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 Iowa 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 the author appear in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Contemporary Women's Writing, OC Weekly, MOLAA, The Normal School, Weird Sister and Otherppl. Playlists for Gurba's writing appear in Largehearted Boy.

Personal life
Gurba was born in Santa Maria, California, United States in 1977. She identifies as queer and as of 2016 lived in Long Beach, California. Gurba attended the University of California, Berkeley.