Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, the color of my skin and my rather peculiar background as an Ethiopian immigrant delineated the border of my li…

- Dinaw Mengestu

There are those who wake up each morning to conquer the day, and then there are those of us who wake up only because we have to. We live in the shado…

- Dinaw Mengestu

Don't think about how your characters sound, but how they see. Watch the world through their eyes - study the extraordinary and the mundane through t…

- Dinaw Mengestu

My mother could never have said she loved fall, but as she walked down the steps with her suitcase in hand toward the red Monte Carlo her husband had…

- Dinaw Mengestu

The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears is very much about America - it just happens to have African and Ethiopian characters, and in fact, it happens…

- Dinaw Mengestu

At night my father often heard sporadic gunfire mixed in with the sound of dogs howling. If the war came closer, soon there would be only minor diffe…

- Dinaw Mengestu

When I was growing up, Forest Park was full of integrated families. It was amazing. One my best friends was Vietnamese. Another one was half-Mexican,…

- Dinaw Mengestu

We persist and linger longer than we think, leaving traces of ourselves wherever we go. If you take that away, then we all simply vanish.

- Dinaw Mengestu

I had lost too much of the heart and all the faith needed to stay afloat in a job where every human encounter felt like an anvil strung around my nec…

- Dinaw Mengestu