David Mura is a memoirist, poet, fiction writer, essayist and literary critic. His newest book is A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity and Narrative Craft in Writing. He is the author of two memoirs, Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei, which won the Oakland PEN Josephine Miles Book Award and was a New York Times Notable Book, and Where the Body Meets Memory. 
 
Mura’s four books of poetry include the National Poetry Contest winner After We Lost Our Way, The Colors of Desire, which won a Carl Sandburg Literary Award, Angels for the Burning, and The Last Incantations. His novel, Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire, was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award, the John Gardner Fiction Prize and Virginia Commonwealth University Cabell First Novelist Award. His collection of essays and interviews, Song for Uncle Tom, Tonto & Mr. Moto: Poetry and Identity, was published in the U. of Michigan’s Poets on Poetry series. 
 
With Carolyn Holbrook, Mura is the co-editor of We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World, an anthology of BIPOC Minnesota writers which contains essays on the murder of George Floyd and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. His next book is The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself, a collection of essays on white historical and fictional narratives on race (fall, 2022). 
 
Mura has also written plays and performance pieces, including Secret Colors, a collaboration with African American novelist Alexs Pate that centers on the Rodney King video and the events that followed it. This performance piece was made into a film, Slowly This, directed by Arthur Jaffa for the PBS series Alive TV. Mura has been featured in the Bill Moyers PBS series on poetry, The Language of Life. In 2021, for Twin Cities Public Television, Mura co-produced, wrote and narrated the documentary, Armed With Language, about the Japanese American linguists who served in the Military Intelligence Service during WWII. Armed With Language won a 2021 Upper Midwest Emmy in the military category.