Blitz Bazawule & Michael Imperioli: A Conversation

Blitz Bazawule is a multidisciplinary artist born in Ghana. His feature directorial debut, The Burial of Kojo, premiered on Netflix. He co-directed Beyoncé’s Black Is King, which earned him a Grammy nomination, and will direct the musical version of The Color Purple for Warner Bros. His artwork has been featured at the Whitney Biennial. In The Scent of Burnt Flowers: A Novel (‎Ballantine Books), when the windshield of his Chevy Impala shatters in a dark diner parking lot in Alabama, Melvin moves without thinking. This time it is the safety of his fiancé, Bernadette, at stake. Impulse keeps them alive, and yet they flee with blood on their hands. With a persistent FBI agent on their trail, they travel to Ghana to seek the help of Melvin’s old college friend – who happens to be the country’s embattled president, Kwame Nkrumah. And the couple’s chance encounter with Ghana’s most beloved highlife musician, Kwesi Kwayson, sparks another leg of a journey full of suspense, lust, magic, and danger. What was meant to be a fresh start quickly spirals into chaos, threatening their relationship and lives. The Scent of Burnt Flowers merges political intrigue, magical encounters, and forbidden romance in an epic collision of morality and power.

Michael Imperioli won an Emmy Award for his starring role as Christopher Moltisanti in the acclaimed TV series The Sopranos. He also wrote five episodes of the show; was co-screenwriter of the film Summer of Sam, and contributed to the short story anthology The Nicotine Chronicles. He is also the co-author, with Sopranos co-star Steve Schirripa, of Woke Up This Morning: The Definitive Oral History of The Sopranos. Additionally, Imperioli is a singer and guitarist in the band ZOPA. The Perfume Burned His Eyes (Akashic Books), his debut novel, begins in 1976. Matthew is a 16-year-old boy living in Jackson Heights, Queens. After losing his two most important male role models – his father and grandfather – his mother use her inheritance to uproot Matthew and herself to a posh apartment building in Manhattan. “The city” is an entirely new and strange world for Matthew. But he soon befriends Lou Reed, who lives in the same building and eventually becomes an unorthodox father figure for him. The novel is written from the point of view of Matthew at age 18, two years after the story begins, and concludes in 2013, three days after Lou Reed’s death, with Matthew in his fifties.