Dinaw Mengestu - Visiting Fiction Writer
Dinaw Mengestu is 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). A native of Ethiopia who came with his family to the United States at the age of two, Mengestu is also a freelance journalist who has reported about life in Darfur, northern Uganda, and eastern Congo. His articles and fiction have appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, and Rolling Stone. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow and recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award, Guardian First Book Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors. He was also included in The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list in 2010. 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 director of the Center for Ethics and Writing. 

The Poets & Writers Series is sponsored by the Temple University MFA Program in Creative Writing, with the assistance of the Department of English. Each year a number of poets and fiction writers are invited to read from and discuss their work to members of both the Temple community and the local Philadelphia arts scene. All events are free and open to the public.