Mya Guarnieri is an award-winning journalist and writer. Author of the forthcoming memoir Crossing the Line: An Israeli-Palestinian Love Story and the critically acclaimed book The Unchosen: The Lives of Israel’s New Others, which was short-listed for the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize, Mya’s reportage, commentary, analysis, and essays have appeared in a wide range of international media outlets and publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Politico, The Washington Post, Haaretz, Slate, Foreign Policy, The Daily Beast, Le Monde Diplomatique, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Jewish Daily Forward, Tablet, Caravan, CounterPunch, Agence France-Presse (AFP), The Boston Review and The Palestine Israel Journal.
Mya got her start working as a journalist in Israel at The Jerusalem Post and went on to become a regular contributor to Al Jazeera English and the Bethlehem-based Palestinian news agency, Ma’an. One of the first journalists invited to join +972 Magazine, a collective of independent Palestinian and Israeli journalists, Mya began writing features for +972 in 2011 and remained a contributor until 2020, when she became a staff writer for Deseret News and Magazine.
Reporting primarily on the intersection of religion and politics while at Deseret, Mya earned a Wilbur Award, a top honor in religion journalism, for her story about the Georgia Senate run-offs. Her story about Border Patrol Chaplains took second place in the highly competitive Best of the West, which is widely considered the most prestigious journalism award in the American West.
A graduate of Columbia University, where she was an international reporting fellow who earned a MA in Journalism with a focus in politics and global affairs, Mya also holds a MFA in Creative Writing from Florida State University. Her short story “Hills Behind Us” was featured as a Story of the Week in Narrative Magazine and her fiction has also been published in The Kenyon Review, Zeek, and elsewhere.
She currently focuses primarily on creative nonfiction and longform journalism. Mya lives in South Florida with her two children.