Book presentation and Scialla!

Join us and music artist from Italy Amir Issaa for a special event! A book presentation with a panel of experts and a fun comedy!

6:30 PM: Panel to present Amir Issaa’s book This Is What I Live For

Panel:

- Amir Issaa, Author and hip-hop artist

- Clarissa Clò, Professor of Italian, SDSU

- Parker Edison, Host and Co-Creator of The Parker Edison Project on KPBS

- Jorge Hernandez, Lecturer in French and Italian, SDSU

- Stephanie Jed, Professor Emerita of Italian Literature, UCSD

- William Nericcio, Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Editor/Director of SDSU Press

- Pasquale Verdicchio, Professor Emeritus of Italian Literature, UCSD

Amir Issaa’s Short Bio

Born and raised in Rome to an Italian mother and an Egyptian father, Amir Issaa is an internationally renowned hip-hop artist who has creatively collaborated with many Italian and international artists over the decades. He is also a social activist and an educator, as part of his activist work, he regularly holds rap writing workshops in schools, prisons, and colleges across the world.

In 2017 Amir published his first book Vivo per questo, a personal and artistic autobiography that illustrates the challenges and dreams of the so called “second generation” in Italy. The book has now been translated in English and published as a bilingual Italian-English edition by SDSU Press as This Is What I Live For: An Afro-Italian Hip Hop Memoir.

About Scialla! (Easy!)

Bruno Beltrame has let it all hang out, for quite a while. All that’s left of his old talent as a writer is just enough to ghost-write other people’s books, biographies of football players or television personalities. His passion for teaching has given up to an apathetic routine of tutoring equally apathetic students, including fifteen-year old Luca, who is as ignorant as the others, but lively and irreverent. One day the boy’s mother turns up, like a ghost from the past, revealing a secret that turns Bruno’s life upside down: Luca is his son, a son he knew nothing about… And there is more: the woman is about to leave for a six-month job as a volunteer in Africa, and the boy cannot and certainly does not want to follow her down there. The woman asks Bruno to take the boy in, and take care of him, but without revealing the truth to him. This is the beginning of an unlikely coexistence between the lethargic former professor and the restless adolescent.

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