Adam Gussow is a professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi and a blues harmonica player and teacher. He has published a number of books on the blues, including Mister Satan’s Apprentice: A Blues Memoir, Beyond the Crossroads: The Devil and the Blues Tradition, and Whose Blues? Facing Up to Race and the Future of the Music. Gussow’s longtime musical partnership with Sterling "Mr. Satan" Magee was the subject of an award-winning documentary, Satan & Adam, which screened on Netflix for two years. 

Schedule

11:15 am to Noon
Bienville Building, Conference Center 118
In the Shadow of the South: Memoirs of Prejudice, Truth, and Hope
Larry Bagneris, Call Me Larry: A Creole Man’s Triumph over Racism and Homophobia
Adam Gussow, My Family and I: A Mississippi Memoir
with moderator A.E. Rooks

12:15 pm to 1:00 pm
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing

My Family and I: A Mississippi Memoir

An inspiring memoir about the author’s lifelong quest for racial reconciliation, the love that sustains his interracial family in contemporary Mississippi, and the “Yes we can!” hope for American renewal that fades after the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and the despair-driven rise of Black Lives Matter.

“A rousing invitation to see ourselves in one another and to summon the courage finally to forge the beloved community Dr. King envisioned—one sustained by hope, reciprocity, and the boundless possibility of our shared humanity.” —Thomas Chatterton Williams

What has happened to the dream of beloved community embraced by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement of the early 1960s—the vision of a just, humane, and colorblind America, a nation of “black and white together” animated by the spirit of mutual respect and strengthened by the bonds of brotherly love? As Adam Gussow shows in this urgently needed new book, the dream, although pressured on every front, remains alive.

At the heart of My Family and I is Gussow’s determination, in King’s terms, to live out the true meaning of America’s creed—a quest for transracial brotherhood that takes him from a blues partnership forged on the streets of 1980s Harlem through graduate training at Princeton and, decades later, a transformative course on the blues literary tradition that he shares with inmates at Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Farm.

Anchoring Gussow’s quest is a story of enduring love: a playful, soulful interracial romance between the newly hired professor at Ole Miss and his soon-to-be-wife Sherrie that blossoms with the birth of a musically gifted son, Shaun. As America explodes with protest and riots in the summer of 2020 after the death of George Floyd, as social justice fundamentalists insist on stigmatizing whiteness and hardening the color line rather than healing the divisions that plague us, Gussow is forced to fight for what he loves—not just the sanctity of his family circle, but King’s dream of beloved community.

My Family and I gifts the reader with hope for a future beyond America’s seemingly insoluble racial dilemmas.