Poppy State - A Labyrinth of Plants and a Story of Beginnings

Winner of the California Independent Booksellers Association 2026 Golden Poppy Award for Nonfiction

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.

Myriam Gurba has lived in California her entire life, with its plants and soils, forests and ecology, immersing herself in the language of the landscape as refracted through the languages and memories of her ancestors. In Poppy State, California plants serve as structural anchors in a wildly inventive work of narrative nonfiction that is part botanical criticism, part personal storytelling, and part study of place. The reader is invited to commune with California with Gurba as their guide, ushered through a compendium of anecdotes, reminiscences, utterances, lists, incantations, newspaper articles, and other ephemera.

Through the stories of these plants she comes to a new understanding of what occurs in the cultivation of a soul. Gurba learns if she can care for her body as she does her plants, her soul can thrive—like the California poppy on her kitchen windowsill. And through walks in the Angeles National Forest, she visits oaks, crows, elderberries, and sycamores, while foraging for acorns, flowers, and berries to adorn her altar at home. Poppy State is a riveting tour de force.

“The mother of intersectional Latinx identity.” —Cosmopolitan

"Scorchingly good."—Cheryl Strayed

“The most fearless writer in America.” —Luis Alberto Urrea, Pulitzer Prize finalist 

"A truly distinctive, authentic, and dynamic literary voice. . . Myriam Gurba is one of our great American intellectuals." —Los Angeles Times