Dinaw Mengestu is the President of the PEN America Board of Trustees and the author of four novels, Someone Like Us (Knopf, 2024), All Our Names (Knopf, 2014), How to Read the Air (Riverhead, 2010), and The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Riverhead, 2007), all New York Times Notable Books.
Born in Ethiopia, his articles and fiction have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, and Rolling Stone. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow and a recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, the National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors.
His most recent novel, Someone Like Us, was chosen as one of President Obama’s ten best books of the year. His work has been translated into more than fifteen languages.
He holds a BA from Georgetown University and an MFA from Columbia University. He is the director of the Written Arts Program at Bard College and the founder and director of the Center for Ethics and Writing.