Meet the 2025 Bloggers
Who Is Covering the 2025 GIA Conference
We are pleased to have David Mura and Myah Goff covering this year’s conference. Both David and Myah will share their comments and reactions throughout the conference. We hope you check out the 2025 Conference Blog for their coverage and reflections throughout the week!
Learn more about each blogger below.
David Mura
Photo by Laichee Yang
David Mura’s most recent book is the acclaimed The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself: Racial Myths and Our American Narratives. His previous book was on creative writing and race, A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity & Narrative Craft in Writing. With essayist Carolyn Holbrook, Mura co-edited the 2021 anthology of Minnesota BIPOC writers, We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World. He has just finished a book of essays on Asian American issues and his own personal journey, Exit: Miss Saigon, which will appear in Sept. 2026.
Mura is a poet, creative nonfiction writer, fiction writer, critic, playwright and performance artist. 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 the 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 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, and his first, After We Lost Our Way was a National Poetry Contest winner.
Mura co-produced, wrote, and narrated the Emmy-winning documentary by Twin Cities Public Television, Armed With Language, about the Japanese American Military Intelligence Services linguists who served in WWII.
In 2019, he won the Kay Sexton Award for contributions to Minnesota literature by the Friends of the St. Paul Library and the Minnesota Book Awards. In 2024, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in General Nonfiction.
Myah Goff
Photo courtesy of Myah Goff
Myah Goff is a Black and Mexican American writer and freelance multimedia journalist from Little Village, Chicago, currently based in the Twin Cities. Her reporting explores the intersections of art, identity, and culture through the voices and stories of immigrants and communities of color. She’s drawn to how creativity can serve as a living archive of resilience, memory, and belonging.
A 2023 graduate of the University of Minnesota’s Hubbard School of Journalism, she has contributed to various publications, including Sahan Journal, Star Tribune, Center for Broadcast Journalism, MPLSART.COM, and the University of St. Thomas Newsroom.
