Access Services: Real-time Captioning
Access Notes: Captioning will be provided for the Zoom event. ASL interpretation available upon request.
Location
Schedule and Tickets
The event is free, but online registration in advance is requested. For other questions contact The Friends at info@thefriends.org or 651-222-3242.
About the Show
Feb. 15, 2023
The six-week Fireside Reading Series highlights the work of some of Minnesota’s finest writers who have published new work the previous year. Celebrate the final events in the current Hamline Midway Library building (or livestreamed via Zoom, with closed captioning available).
David Mura is a poet, writer of creative nonfiction and fiction, critic, and playwright. He is author of A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing and the memoirs Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality, and Identity. He is coeditor, with Carolyn Holbrook, of We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World (Minnesota, 2021). He lives in Minneapolis.
He will speak about his new nonfiction book, The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself.
The police murders of two Black men, Philando Castile and George Floyd, frame this searing exploration of the historical and fictional narratives that white America tells itself to justify and maintain white supremacy. From the country’s founding through the summer of Black Lives Matter in 2020, David Mura unmasks how white stories about race attempt to erase the brutality of the past and underpin systemic racism in the present.
Intertwining history, literature, ethics, and the deeply personal, Mura looks back to foundational narratives of white supremacy to show how white identity is based on shared belief in the pernicious myths, false histories, and racially segregated fictions that allow whites to deny their culpability in past atrocities and current inequities.