My Vanishing Country
by Bakari Sellers

In the tradition of Hillbilly Elegy, the CNN analyst and youngest state representative in South Carolina’s history illuminates the lives of America’s forgotten rural, Black working-class men and women.

Part memoir, part historical and cultural analysis, Bakari Sellers takes readers on a journey through the South’s past, present, and future. Anchoring his narrative in Denmark, South Carolina, readers will discover the pride and the pain that continues to flow through the soil of one of the poorest states in the nation.

While charting the rise of his father to becoming an influential president of the state’s NAACP chapter, Sellers offers a firsthand description of the South’s dwindling rural, Black working class—many of whom can trace their ancestry back for seven generations.

In Sellers’ poetic personal history, we are awakened to the other “Forgotten Men & Women,” who the media seldom acknowledges. For Sellers these are his family members, neighbors, and friends.

In each of the book’s twelve chapters, Sellers humanizes their plight as they struggle to gain access to healthcare with disappearing rural hospitals, struggle to make ends meet with the evaporation of the factories they relied on, and they struggle to forge a path forward without succumbing to hopelessness. Country is also a love letter to fatherhood—first from Sellers’ father, whose life lessons anchor Bakari, and to his newborn twins, who he hopes will embrace the Sellers name and legacy.