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 exhibited 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.