Dinaw Mengestu will be the keynote speaker at the NEA Big Read Closing Ceremony. Mengestu is an Ethiopian-American novelist and writer. In addition to three novels, he has written for Rolling Stone, Harper’s, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications. He is the Program Director of Written Arts at Bard College. In 2007 the National Book Foundation named him a “5 under 35” honoree, and he was selected as a MacArthur Fellow in 2012.