Mikael Merissa is a novelist based in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Born in Ethiopia and raised in the United States, his work explores exile, memory, masculinity and the tensions between ambition and return.

He practiced immigration law for more than two decades before turning to fiction.

His completed novel, The Suicide Notes, examines identity, faith and political longing in the Ethiopian Diaspora. He is currently at work on a second novel, The Blue Horses.

He began writing fiction in the years his legal practice was at its most demanding, in the margins of case files and on the long drives between client meetings. The habit grew into a discipline, and the discipline into a body of work. What carried across was a preoccupation with voice — with the specific cadence of people whose lives had been interrupted by borders, and whose interior languages outlasted the legal ones they had to learn.

His novels are set in the territory between the country one leaves and the country one becomes. They are interested in the Ethiopian Diaspora as a literary country of its own, and in what faith, politics, and inheritance become when they travel. The Suicide Notes takes the form of letters that go unsent. The Blue Horses, underway, takes the form of a son’s reckoning with what a father could not put down.

He lives in St. Paul with his family. He reads widely in Ethiopian and diasporic literature, in African writing in English and in translation, and in the long American tradition of novels that ask what it means to have arrived.