Monday, October 13th: Novelist David Mura

An acclaimed memoirist, poet, playwright, and performance artist, David Mura is the author of the memoirs Turning Japanese and Where the Body Meets Memory, along with three collections of poetry and the critical essays Song for Uncle Tom, Tonto & Mr. Moto: Poetry & Identity. Together with Alex Pate, Mura created the performance piece, Secret Colors, an exploration of the relationships between men of color, which was adapted to the film, Slowly This , and broadcast on PBS.

Praise for Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire

"With a novelist's human eye and a poet's taut economy . . . [Mura's] prose is diamond-pure, and he uses it to tell two stories in counterpoint, one of his parents' flight from their ethnicity and their past, the other of his own recovery of both. . . . Mura's book may be read as a repudiation of America's fantastic power to assimilate, or as an example of it. Either way, the story has rarely been so movingly told." - Washington Post

Listen to David Mura...

Phoebe Wong