In this paper, we introduced a family of distributions with a very flexible shape named generalized scale mixtures of generalized asymmetric normal distributions (GSMAGN). We investigated the main properties of the new family including moments, skewness, kurtosis coefficients and order statistics. A variant of the expectation maximization (EM)-type algorithm was established by combining the proflie likihood approach (PLA) with the classical expectation conditional maximization (ECM) algorithm for parameter estimation of this model. This approach with analytical expressions in the E-step and tractable M-step can greatly improve the computational speed and efficiency of the algorithm. The performance of the proposed algorithm was assessed by some simulation studies. The feasibility of the proposed methodology was illustrated through two real datasets.