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Adoptee Reading is a catalog of books written by adoptees along with other adoption-related books recommended by adoptees.

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Adoptee-Authored Books Published in 2021

                We’ve added twenty-three thirty-four books published in 2021 and written by adoptees to the Adoptee Reading catalog!

Recently Published & Forthcoming Books

Out of the Fog: Poems of Nature, Nurture and Imagination

Using evocative language and powerful emotion, Jill Uchiyama’s poems expose the creative interior of an adopted girl, from infancy to middle age. Through them, we discover the rare and often

Survival Without Roots: Memoir of an Adopted Englishwoman (Book 1)

The Survival Without Roots memoir trilogy portrays the melting pot of emotions experienced by many adoptees associated with their lack of identity, as they spend a lifetime wondering … “Is there anyone

Truth and Agency: Writing Ideas For People Who Were Adopted

In order to feel fully rooted, it’s important to know your story. If your personal narrative starts “The day we got you,” then you are already in the gaslit land

Jules Fae: A Story of Adoption and Reunion

First mother, teenage Claire Jordan, enters college in 1965. Intending to be Nebraska’s Ideal Coed, she discovers she’s pregnant just weeks into her freshman year. Expelled from school and disowned

Search & Reunion

The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be: A Speculative Memoir of Transracial Adoption

Part memoir, part speculative fiction, this novel explores the often surreal experience of growing up as a mixed-Black transracial adoptee. Dream Country author Shannon Gibney returns with a new book woven

Invisible Boy: A Memoir of Self-Discovery

A powerful, experiential journey from white cult to Black consciousness: Harrison Mooney’s riveting story of self-discovery lifts the curtain on the trauma of transracial adoption and the internalized antiblackness at

Accidental Sisters: The Story of My 52-Year Wait to Meet My Biological Sibling

Relinquished at birth to Catholic Charities in 1959, Kathe Linn Caire adores her adoptive family and has never considered searching for her birth parents. At age fifty-two, though, a sudden

Psychology/Self-help

Truth and Agency: Writing Ideas For People Who Were Adopted

In order to feel fully rooted, it’s important to know your story. If your personal narrative starts “The day we got you,” then you are already in the gaslit land

Under My Bed and Other Essays

Jody Keisner was raised in rural Nebraska towns by a volatile father and kind but passive mother. As a young adult living alone for the first time, she began a

Voices Unheard: A Reflective Journal for Adult Adoptees

Adoption is based on loss, often yielding deep feelings of inner turmoil, grief, disconnection, and, at times, overwhelming fear and anxiety stemming from those old, unattended wounds. Yet it is common for

Anthologies

Dear Me….: Letters to Our Younger Adoptee Selves

This is a book of words and pictures. The images are important because they reflect the people we are now and the children we were growing up. We can see

Together At Last: Stories of Adoption and Reunion in the Age of DNA

Together At Last is a collection of first-person stories that explores the intersection of multiple histories: the Korean War, military camptowns, immigration, and transnational adoption. Taken together, they challenge us

Mixed Korean: Our Stories

From the struggles of the Korean War, to the modern dilemmas faced by those who are mixed race, comes an assortment of stories that capture the essence of what it

Journalism/Research

Somewhere Sisters: A Story of Adoption, Identity, and the Meaning of Family

An incredible, deeply reported story of identical twins Isabella and Hà, born in Viêt Nam and raised on opposite sides of the world, each knowing little about the other’s existence until they were reunited as teenagers, against all odds. It was 1998 in Nha Trang, Việt Nam, and Liên struggled to care for her newborn twin girls. Hà was taken in by Liên’s sister, and she grew up in a rural village with her aunt,

Growing in the Dark: Adoption Secrecy and Its Consequences

Generations of adults who were adopted as children have been kept in the dark about their original identities. The law sealing birth records forever, even to the adopted person, passed in 1935 in California, sweeping adoption´s emotional complexities under the rug and making it possible to keep an adoption itself a secret. Growing in the Dark: Adoption Secrecy and Its Consequences takes you through California´s early adoption laws, highlighting the passage of the original law that sealed

Ripped at the Root: An Adoption Story

“With searing detail and lean, crisp prose, in Ripped at the Root Mary Cardaras tells the story of Dena Polites, a woman born to a young unwed Greek couple who was adopted by married Greek Americans in Ohio. Polites’s tale serves as a focal point for the some 4,000 Greek infants and children who, in the years after World War II, were torn from their families, country, culture and dispatched to live with distant strangers

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Children/Teens

The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be: A Speculative Memoir of Transracial Adoption

Part memoir, part speculative fiction, this novel explores the often surreal experience of growing up as a mixed-Black transracial adoptee. Dream Country author Shannon Gibney returns with a new book woven

Everyone Hates Kelsie Miller

There’s no one Kelsie Miller hates more than Eric Mulvaney Ortiz—the homecoming king, captain of the football team, and academic archrival in her hyper-competitive prep school. But after Kelsie’s best

Poetry

Out of the Fog: Poems of Nature, Nurture and Imagination

Using evocative language and powerful emotion, Jill Uchiyama’s poems expose the creative interior of an adopted girl, from infancy to middle age. Through them, we discover the rare and often

Person, Perceived Girl

Person, Perceived Girl is poetry collection that explores Blackness–specifically queer, Midwestern, disabled, and transracially adopted Blackness. Poems in this manuscript explore identity, lineage, and body. Adoptee Author: A. A. Vincent

Fiction

The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be: A Speculative Memoir of Transracial Adoption

Part memoir, part speculative fiction, this novel explores the often surreal experience of growing up as a mixed-Black transracial adoptee. Dream Country author Shannon Gibney returns with a new book woven

The Sense of Wonder

An Asian American basketball star walks into a gym. No one recognizes him, but everyone stares anyway. It is the start of a joke but what is the punchline? When