Kayla E. is an award-winning designer based in North Carolina. She is the Creative Director at Fantagraphics Books, where she has designed and overseen the production of nearly one hundred titles over the past four years, helping to shape the visual landscape of contemporary comics and art book publishing. Beyond her work at Fantagraphics, she has created books and visual materials for institutions and publishers including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Algonquin Books, Workman Publishing, and Deep Vellum Press. For a decade, she led the visual direction of the Whiting Award–winning literary magazine Nat. Brut.

 

Her work has been recognized with major honors, including the Albert Alcalay Prize in Visual Arts at Harvard University, a Simon Rockower Award for magazine design, multiple American Illustration Awards, and two Eisner Award nominations, including one for Best Book Design. Alongside her design career, Kayla is the author of Precious Rubbish, winner of the 2025 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel and an Honorable Mention in the 2025 International Latino Book Awards; the book was also selected for the New York Public Library’s 2025 Best Books of the Year. She studied Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard and held a Hodder Fellowship in Creative Writing at Princeton University.