Dinaw Mengestu

Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978.  In 1980 he immigrated to the United States with his mother and sister, joining his father, who had fled the communist revolution in Ethiopia two years before. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and of Columbia University's MFA program in fiction. He is the recipient of a 2006 fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His first novel, The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, will be published this March by Penguin Riverhead. He has also recently reported stories for Harper's and Jane magazine, profiling a young woman who was kidnapped and forced to become a soldier in the brutal war in Uganda, and for Rolling Stone on the tragedy in Darfur. The Lannan Visiting Writer at Georgetown University for spring 2007, Mengestu lives in New York City.