If the name Myriam Gurba doesn’t ring a bell, it should.

In December 2019, she wrote“Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck: My Bronca With Fake-Ass Social Justice Literature,”a fiery essay that eviscerated Jeanine Cummins’ “American Dirt,” a novel about a middle-class Mexican bookseller who flees with her son to the United States to escape cartel violence. In the piece, Gurba, who is queer and half-Chicana, claimed Cummins’ “Frankenstein of a book” peddled “overly ripe Mexican stereotypes,” stank of patriarchal white saviorism and ignored the harsh realities Mexican women actually face when seeking refuge in the United States.

The essay went viral. Despite the fact that Cummins’ book became an Oprah’s Book Club pick, Gurba’s literary smackdown sparked a national reckoning for Big Publishing, an industry Gurba later excoriated for publishing a “fantasy version of Mexico meant to satisfy the gringo market for Brown exoticism.” It also earned her a reputation as a woman not afraid to speak out against injustice, no matter the consequences. (A few months after the article’s release, Gurba was put on administrative leave from her job as a teacher.)

In her latest book, “Creep: Accusations and Confessions,” which includes the viral essay in its entirety, Gurba continues her work as a fearless and outspoken social and racial justice advocate. In 11 unabashedly angry essays that both enlighten and enrage, she takes on everything from Joan Didion’s problematic racial grammar (“The White Onion”) to the warped psychology of California’s infamous Night Stalker and other serial killers (“Cucuy”) to the reasons behind the shockingly high femicide rate in America. (A few essays touch on this topic from different angles.)

Right from the beginning, “Creep” reads like it’s just itching to explode. Just as in her previous book, “Mean,” a quasi-memoir about her experiences of sexual abuse — including an attack by a man named Tommy Jesse Martinez, who went on to sexually assault and murder an itinerant worker named Sophia Torres — Gurba comes out swinging in every piece.

In “Slimed,” a scathing essay that lambastes Alice Sebold’s egregious misidentification of her rapist following the publication of her autobiographical novel “Lucky,” Gurba compares getting raped with the act of getting slimed on the 1980s Canadian TV show “You Can’t Do That on Television.”

“Rape is sort of like being slimed. It’s gross and embarrassing and hard to hide. Some people laugh at you for it. Others feel sorry. A fair number of people think you deserve it,” she writes. “The slime never fully goes away. … Something will eventually happen to remind you of the sliming, and you’ll smell it, see it, taste it, touch it, and hear it all over again.”

“痒”,一个嘲讽的作品:一个老师告诉one of Gurba’s Mexican high school students to put on his hat due to her fear of head lice (Mexican kids, she believed, were “dirtier”), and “Waterloo,” about a road trip to her girlfriend Sam’s very white, Fox News-watching Iowa hometown, both underscore how insidious racial stereotypes are and hold the offenders accountable for their ignorance. At first glance, she writes, Sam’s grandmother thought Gurba was “an injun,” and Sam’s brother was surprised she was smart.

In the excruciating final story, “Creep,” Gurba frames her three-year relationship with a manipulative ex-boyfriend (whom she calls Q) against a catalog of other creepy male behavior, including that of O.J. Simpson and Clarence Thomas in the Anita Hill hearings.

Her recollections of Q’s punching, slapping, kicking, limb breaking, strangling, life threatening and various forms of sexual abuse of her are horrifying. But it’s this line from her ninth-grade religion teacher that Gurba uses in parallel with her discussion of Q’s sick motivations that’s both illuminating and the most chilling: “Sexual harassment victims aren’t real. They’re women who don’t want to exercise personal responsibility.”

On the whole, “Creep” is a book that gives Gurba free rein to scream and rant and unleash her wrath against the myriad ways she’s been wronged and all the things that ail her (and us). But one of the most balanced — and touching — essays is actually focused on someone else, her cousin Desiree, who spent more than a decade in California’s prison system for petty crimes and drug use before getting clean. “What my cousin needed from the government was health care and housing,” she writes. “Instead, it imprisoned her for self-medicating.”

In the end, Desiree graduated from the Second Chance Women’s Re-entry Court program, which “taught her to cry without fear or shame, to release her truth and pain.” After reading Gurba’s latest work, one might wish that outcome for all her subjects who have suffered.

Alexis Burling is a freelance writer.