David Mura
David Mura
Competition: US & Canada
David Mura’s most recent book: The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself: Racial Myths and Our American Narratives. His previous was on creative writing and race, A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity & Narrative Craft in Writing. Mura co-edited a 2021 anthology of MN BIPOC writers, We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World. Mura is a nonfiction writer, poet, novelist. A Sansei (third generation Japanese American), Mura has written two memoirs: Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei, which won a Josephine Miles Book Award from the Oakland PEN and was one of the NY 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 MN Book Award, the John Gardner Fiction Prize and Virginia Commonwealth U. Cabell First Novelist Award. Mura has written four books of poetry, including Angels for the Burning and The Last Incantations. His second, The Colors of Desire, won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award from the Friends of the Chicago Public Library; his first After We Lost Our Way was a National Poetry Contest winner.