Dinaw Mengestu is the award-winning author of How to Read the Air and All Our Names. His debut novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, garnered critical acclaim for its haunting depiction of the immigrant experience in America, earning him comparisons to Fitzgerald and BABEL alum V.S. Naipaul. The recipient of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” award, The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” award, The Guardian First Book Award, and a MacArthur “genius” grant, Mengestu was born in Ethiopia and immigrated to the US at the age of two. A graduate of Georgetown University and Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction, Mengestu’s articles have appeared in Harper’s, Rolling Stone, and The New Yorker.