Dinaw Mengestu

Born in Addis Ababa, Dinaw Mengestu immigrated to the United States in 1980, rejoining his father, an Ethiopian Airlines executive who had fled the communist regime. After graduating from Columbia’s MFA program, Mengestu published his debut novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, in 2007. “I always used to say that I hated this term the immigrant novel, or the immigrant novelist,” he said in 2017. “Now I think, very explicitly, I am an immigrant writer, and I want my work to be seen as such.”