Going Remote: A Teacher's Journey

A searingly honest graphic memoir dispatch from a community college professor who cares deeply for his students and family while also combating personal health issues from the frontlines of public education during the pandemic.

With Peter Glanting's powerful illustrations, author Adam Bessie, an English professor and graphic essayist, uses the unique historical moment of the COVID-19 pandemic as a catalyst to explore the existing inequalities and student struggles that plague the public education system. This graphic memoir chronicles the reverberations from the onset of the pandemic in 2020 when students and educators left their physical classrooms for remote learning. As a professor at a community college, Bessie shows how despite these challenges, teachers work tirelessly to create a more equitable educational system by responding to mental health issues and student needs.

From the Black Lives Matter protests to fielding distressed emails from students to considering the future of his own career, Going Remote also tells the personal story of Bessie's cancer diagnosis and treatment during the pandemic. A fusion of memoir, meditation, and scholarship, Going Remote is a powerful account of a crisis moment in educational history demonstrating both personal and societal changes.

Includes back matter revealing the literary and theoretical touchpoints that inform Going Remote (works by Octavia Butler, Neil Postman, Jaron Lanier, and Diane Ravitch).

Going Remote is a joint production of The Censored Press and Seven Stories Press.

"Bessie's debut graphic memoir of teaching at a community college during the pandemic while undergoing treatment for cancer swells with a determined optimism even while being threaded with dystopian references." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"For the philosophically inclined, there is much to enjoy here….For those who enjoy the process of creating comics, an interview with the creators closing out the book will be of great interest." Booklist

"This is comics at the highest level: beautiful, profound, and full of heart." Justin Hall, editor of No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics and Chair MFA in Comics at California College of the Arts

"This wonderful book challenges readers concretely to visualize and think through possible futures...a foothold for anyone trying to understand not only teaching and the pandemic, but our place in the world as caring human beings." Jay Gillen, author of Educating for Insurgency: The Roles of Young People in Schools of Poverty and The Power in The Room: Radical Education Through Youth Organizing and Employment

Adam Bessie is a community college English professor in the San Francisco Bay Area and writes comics which have been published in many national outlets, including the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times. He won the New York Association of Black Journalists 2018 Award for the graphic essay "Betsy Devos' 'School Choice' Movement Isn't Social Justice. It's a Return to Segregation" (with Erik Thurman). He lives on the site of a former dynamite factory with his wife and son on the San Pablo Bay.

Peter Glanting is an illustrator and product designer. He also claims he was a baron in “the old country," but people are haters and they don't often believe him (#notfair). He likes sock puppets and dogs with bushy eyebrows. Peter holds a B.A. in English from the University of California at Davis, and an M.F.A. in Comics from the California College of the Arts. He lives and works in Portland, Oregon.