Jo Ivester shares her moving memoir The Outskirts of Hope. In 1967, when Jo Ivester was ten years old, her father transplanted his young family from a suburb of Boston to a small town in the heart of the Mississippi cotton fields, where he became the medical director of the local clinic. The Outskirts of Hope combines journals left by Jo’s mother, as well as writings of her own, to paint a vivid, moving, and inspiring portrait of her family s experiences living and working in an all-black town during the height of the civil rights movement.