On Tuesday, October 27th, at 7 p.m., the Joynes Room will host acclaimed Ethiopian-American novelist Dinaw Mengestu  on a reading and Q&A. A graduate of Georgetown and Columbia, Mengestu was named a “20 under 40” writer by The New Yorker and received the National Book Award Foundation’s “5 under 35” Award for his dazzling debut, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. The author of three novels, Mengestu speaks with profound eloquence about the immigrant experience. While supplies last, honors students who commit to attend the reading can receive a free copy of a book by Dinaw Mengestu by inquiring in person at the front desk of the Joynes Reading Room (CRD 007).

“All Our Names” is a book about an immigrant, but more profoundly it is a story about finding out who you are, about how much of you is formed by your family and your homeland, and what happens when those things go up in smoke. There is great sadness and much hard truth in this novel, as there is everywhere in Mengestu’s fiction. But like the best storytellers, he knows that endings don’t have to be happy to be satisfying, that mysteries don’t need to be explained, that discriminating between what can and can’t be known is more than enough. And he is generous enough to imbue his characters with this awareness as well.” —Malcolm Jones, New York Times Sunday Book Review