The Black American writer William Demby forged a dynamic career across Rome’s culture industries as a novelist, journalist, and screenwriter, translator, and actor in the Italian cinema in the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on archival research into the author’s papers from this period, this talk will explore how Demby channels these experiences into his genre-blurring, semi-autobiographical novel The Catacombs (1965).

Melanie Masterton Sherazi is a Terra Foundation Affiliated Fellow at AAR.

This talk is a collaboration between the American Academy in Rome, Black History Month Florence, and Villa La Pietra, NYU Florence. The start time is 6:00pm Central European Time (12:00 noon Eastern Time).