The Writing Seminars is happy to announce that Dinaw Mengestu will join the department as a Writer-in-Residence through the President’s Reading Series: Literature of Social Import in spring 2017.  His undergraduate class, Readings in Fiction:  Hybrid Forms, will focus on essays that have the texture and imagination of a short story.

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.