David Mura’s latest book is on creative writing and race, A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity & Narrative Craft in Writing. With essayist Carolyn Holbrook, Mura is co-editor of an anthology of Minnesota BIPOC writers, We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World. His next book is The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself, a collection of essays contrasting historical and fiction narratives by white Americans and African Americans, appearing fall 2022.

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.

A Sansei or third generation Japanese American, Mura has written two memoirs: Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei , which won a 1991 Josephine Miles Book Award from the Oakland PEN and was listed in the New York Times Notable Books of Year, and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality and Identity . 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.

Mura’s latest collection of poetry is The Last Incantations. His second, The Colors of Desire, won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award from the Friends of the Chicago Public Library, and his first After We Lost Our Way was a National Poetry Contest winner.