Lavender Graduation 2016

Wednesday, April 27, 2016
Great Room, Healey Family Student Center
Ceremony: 5:00pm – 7:00pm
Reception: 7:00pm – 9:00pm

Lavender Graduation is a special ceremony for LGBTQ and Ally undergraduate and graduate students to acknowledge their achievements, contributions, and unique experiences at Georgetown University. This is an opportunity to celebrate the graduating students and bring the community together, along with our distinguished guests, to share in our history and progress.

2016 Keynote Speaker

Dinaw Mengestu (C’00) is a MacArthur Fellow and award winning writer whose novels and nonfiction pieces explore the complexities of the African diaspora within the context of the United States. Originally from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Mengestu and his family immigrated to America in 1980 while fleeing the communist revolution. Mengestu’s writing is concerned not only with the dislocations experienced by immigrants, but also with broader questions of identity, including how individuals define themselves by their dreams, their choices, and the place or places they call home. In 2014, he was named one of The New Yorker’s top 20 fiction writers under age 40. Each of his novels, The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, How to Read the Air, and All Our Names have been well received by critics around the world.

In addition to his fiction writing, Mengestu is also a talented freelance journalist, recently making forays into war-torn regions of sub-Saharan Africa to write about life in Darfur, northern Uganda, and eastern Congo near the border with Rwanda. His journalism and fiction have appeared in such publications as Harper’s, Granta, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and the Wall Street Journal.

Dinaw Mengestu received a B.A. (2000) from Georgetown University and an M.F.A. (2005) from Columbia University. He is the recipient of a 2006 fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and he was the Lannan Visiting Writer at Georgetown University in 2007. Mengestu was the 2012 MacArthur Genius Grant Recipient. He served as the Lannan Foundation Chair in poetics (2012-2015) at Georgetown University.

“It’s hard sometimes to remember why we do anything in the first place. It’s nice to think there’s a purpose, or even a real decision that turns everything in one direction, but that’s not always true, is it? We just fall into our lives.”

― Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

For more information:

2012 MacArthur Fellow

Understanding the Puzzles of Identity, All Our Names interview