A young black man narrates his story of friendship and war in post-colonial Africa. A young white woman narrates her story of meeting and coming to love that man in a small Midwestern American town.

Mengestu reworks his experience emigrating to the U.S. in his third novel "All Our Names." Dinaw Mengestu talks about his new novel "All Our Names," which narrates the story of a young black man in ...

Dinaw Mengestu, the director of Bard College's Written Arts Program and the founder and director of the Center for Ethics and Writing, was elected president of PEN America in December 2025. Mengestu ...

A novelist, journalist and professor, Dinaw Mengestu, 34, has been praised for his work exploring the identities of Africans transitioning to life in America — and those still inhabiting the war-torn ...

Across four fine novels, Dinaw Mengestu has challenged conventional wisdom about how immigrant narratives ought to work. It’s not just that he’s skeptical of pat yarns about trauma and assimilating ...

Dinaw Mengestu's How to Read the Air is an unsentimental meditation on the immigrant experience and the illusory idea of asylum. With lyrical... From Dinaw Mengestu, A 'How To' With Few Answers In his ...

Dinaw Mengestu's third novel - the Ethiopian American writer's first since being named a MacArthur Fellow in 2012 - is profoundly moving. It is sly about moving you. His prose is simple, and "All Our ...

Dinaw Mengestu talks about his new novel “All Our Names,” which narrates the story of a young black man who comes of age in post-colonial Africa and the young white woman who meets and falls in love ...

As they do in life, unanswered questions nag in Dinaw Mengestu’s new novel, “Someone Like Us.” That is what sets a man on a cross-country trip to understand his father’s past and, ultimately, his own.