Gussow Wins Award for Book on Violence and the Blues

Adam Gussow

Adam Gussow, assistant professor of English and Southern Studies, is the latest recipient of the Society for Southern Literature’s C. Hugh Holman Award. Named for the late University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill English professor and Southern Literary Journal editor, the award recognizes the “best book of literary scholarship or criticism in Southern literature during a given calendar year,” according to the society. Gussow received the award for Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition (Chicago, 2002) at the December convention of the Modern Language Association in San Diego.

“ Seems Like Murder Here is a classic interdisciplinary study,” said Center director Charles Regan Wilson, who won the award with Center founding director Bill Ferris in 1990 for the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 1989). “Adam’s depth of understanding of the music and community makes his book stand out as one of the most important studies of African American literature,” Wilson said.

An expansion of Gussow’s dissertation, Seems Like Murder Here is his first scholarly work and his second blues-themed book. Mister Satan’s Apprentice: A Blues Memoir, an account of Gussow’s experience playing harmonica alongside Harlem guitarist Sterling Magee, was published by Pantheon in 1998.

“ It’s extremely rare for an assistant professor’s first scholarly book to win this kind of prize,” said Joseph Urgo, chair and professor of English at the University. “This proves the point that Adam Gussow is a rising star in Southern Studies.”

Besides the Holman Award, Seems Like Murder Here recently received a John G. Cawelti Book Award honorable mention from the American Culture Association, and a section of the book published in African American Review won the journal’s Darwin T. Turner Award for the best essay of 2003.

Jennifer Southall