ABOUT
Kayla E. is a Mexican American artist from Texas. She is the author of Precious Rubbish, which won the 2025 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel and received an Honorable Mention in the 2025 International Latino Book Awards. She has earned two Eisner Award nominations, and her work appears in The New Yorker, NOW (the New Comics Anthology), Ecotone, and The Comics Journal, among others. As an undergraduate at Harvard University, she won the Albert Alcalay Prize in Visual Arts, and in 2023–2024 she held a Hodder Fellowship in Creative Writing at Princeton University. Museums and galleries including the North Carolina Museum of Art, Culture Hole, Central Server Works / Marian Cramer Projects, Marfa Invitational, and the Goss-Michael Foundation / Hignite Projects have installed her work. She served as editor-in-chief of the Whiting Award–winning literary magazine Nat. Brut for nine years and co-edited a collection of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy comic strips. Precious Rubbish, forthcoming in Spanish and French translation, received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist and is included in the New York Public Library's 2025 Best Books of the Year, Booklist's Best 10 Graphic Biographies & Memoirs of 2025, and The Guardian's Best Graphic Novels of 2025. Kayla works as Creative Director at Fantagraphics and lives in North Carolina with her wife and two dogs.
EDUCATION
Harvard University
B.A., Visual and Environmental Studies
Praise for Precious Rubbish by Kayla E.
2025 Ignatz Award Winner: Outstanding Graphic Novel
“Precious Rubbish is a scream as precisely pitched as a middle C from a tuning fork . . . Her work is such an unexpected mixture of control and frankness that it is impossible to ignore.” ― The New York Times
“Kayla E. uses her medium to striking effect: her wry portrait reveals a fresh eye, at once vulnerable and undaunted.” ― The New Yorker
“This four-color atomic bomb of a comic signals the arrival of a formidable talent.” ― ★ Publishers Weekly Starred Review
“Kayla E.’s uniquely unconventional, hauntingly shocking debut graphic memoir is reminiscent of a complicated mosaic that’s missing pieces but has been filled in with unexpected replacements to create a disturbing collage both horrific and beautiful.” ― ★ Booklist Starred Review