“Myriam es una diosa furiosa”
-LUIS ALBERTO URREA
“One of our great American intellectuals.” — Los Angeles Times
poppy state
A LABYRINTH OF PLANTS AND A STORY OF BEGINNINGS
Release date: October 21, 2025
From the award-winning author of Creep comes a powerful book by a writer at the peak of her powers—at once a love letter to California and a literary tour de force that tells the story of resilience and reclamation through a relationship with plants, memory, myth, and indigenous knowledge.
“Like wandering a maze, the language in Poppy State opens to puns and image and history… poppies and oak tree, Chumash history and Spanish missions, grandmothers and curanderas wearing gold grills. This is Myriam Gurba at her most expansive and impressionistic.” — Ingrid Rosas Contreras, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Finalist for The Man Who Could Move Clouds
“I was bewitched in the ways I wanted to be, reading Poppy State — brought under a spell that offered me greater clarity, a new sense of myself and others, of California, plants, and purposes. Garden-magic, born of tending to the ground, becomes much more than that under Gurba’s incisive, guiding eye.” — Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
“A propulsive, unclassifiable book about ecology and self, Poppy State is as elegant and blistering as fire — and just as unpredictable. Gurba is the poet laureate of righteous anger and reclamation.” — Carmen Maria Machado, award winning author of In the Dream House
events
CREEP
“[A] ruthless and razor-sharp essay collection.” — The Millions
“This book is ceremony: beautiful, difficult, and important” — Imani Perry
“Absorbing. . . Gurba turns her unblinking gaze to life’s cruelties, weaving together disparate threads that somehow hold in the end.” — Carolina A. Miranda, Los Angeles Times
“Witty, confident, and effortlessly provocative, Gurba writes about the things that piss her off with poison and precision, sometimes daring readers to look for themselves in the tangled complicity flowchart. . . Creep goes to some dark places, but there’s something joyous about Gurba’s righteous and ravenous worldview.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
“[Myriam Gurba] is the mother of intersectional Latinx identity.” —Cosmopolitan
“Truly exceptional. . . Gurba’s lyrical prose forces us to face the sexism, racism, homophobia, and other systems of oppression that allow some Americans to get away with murder while the rest of us live in constant fear. Every piece is rife with well-timed humor and surprising conclusions, many of which come from the author’s staggering command of history. Profoundly insightful, thoroughly researched, incredibly inventive, and laugh-out-loud funny, this book is a masterpiece of wit and vulnerability.” —Kirkus *starred review*
SANTA MARIA
Myriam Gurba’s youthful obsession with Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother turns to frustration over how its subject, Florence Owens Thompson, an Indigenous woman, has been misperceived.
“A drunk named John Steinbeck wrote a lot about California. My father had given me one of Steinbeck’s novels, Cannery Row, which I preferred to The Red Pony, another Steinbeck novel given to me by my sixth-grade teacher. Cannery Row did something that no other novel I’d read had done: it mentioned my hometown. ‘Doc didn’t stop in Salinas for a hamburger. But he stopped in Gonzalez, in King City, and in Paso Robles. He had a hamburger and beer in Santa Maria – two in Santa Maria, because it was a long pull from there to Santa Barbara.'”
“Myriam Gurba is the most fearless writer in America. And most generous and kind to those who have no champion, while setting fire to the towers of the villainous. Long may she reign.”
Luis Alberto Urrea, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Good Night, Irene
“Honest and darkly funny, the book is riddled with moments that will have you nodding, cringing, and crying right along with the author.”
Harper’s Bazaar
“Like most truly great books, Mean made me laugh, cry and think. Myriam Gurba’s a scorchingly good writer.”
Cheryl Strayd, NYTimes
“What makes this so good? There are many answers, beginning with Gurba’s radical and necessary empathy.”
David Ulin, Alta Online
“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.”
Parul Sehgal, NYTimes
“Stop everything and read this brave and tender book.”
Carmen Giménez Smith, Oprah Magazine
Bio
Myriam Gurba is a writer and activist. Her first book, the short story collection Dahlia Season, won the Edmund White Award for debut fiction. O, the Oprah Magazine, ranked her true crime memoir Mean as one of the best LGBTQ books of all time. Creep, her most recent book, is a finalist for a National Book Critics’ Circle award in criticism, and won the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction. The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Vox, and Paris Review have published her work. She is a co-founder of Dignidad Literaria, a grassroots organization committed to combatting racism in the book world. She is active in the anti-rape movement.