Dinaw Mengestu

Dinaw Mengestu is an Ethiopian-American novelist who has garnered widespread critical acclaim for his intimate depictions of the immigrant experience in America. The author of three novels, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, How to Read the Air, and All Our Names, Mengestu has received numerous awards, including the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” Award, The New Yorker’s “20 under 40″ award, and the 2008 Lannan Literary Fellowship. In his talks and keynote presentations, Mengestu explores issues of cultural identity and dislocation and challenges audiences to think critically about the reality of the American dream.

His debut novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, earned him comparisons to Bellow, Fitzgerald, and Naipaul and was named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2007. The novel tells the story of Sepha Stephanos, who fled the Ethiopian Revolution and immigrated to the United States where he owns a failing grocery store and struggles with feelings of isolation and nostalgia. His follow-up novel, All Our Names, is an unforgettable love story about a searing affair between an American woman and an African man in the 1970s. All Our Names was included in “Best Books of the Year” lists by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, and more. In his latest book, Someone Like Us, the son of Ethiopian immigrants seeks to understand a hidden family history and uncovers a past colored by unexpected loss, addiction, and the enduring emotional pull toward home.

Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978 and immigrated to the United States in 1980 where his family settled in Illinois. A graduate of Georgetown University and Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction, Mengestu was the recipient of the 2006 fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and received the 2012 MacArthur Foundation Genius Award. Mengestu currently teaches at Georgetown University and Brooklyn College and his fiction and journalism have been published in The New Yorker, Granta, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, and the Wall Street Journal.

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