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 Won Lee, the first Asian American in the NBA, stuns the world in a seven-game winning streak, the global mediaRead More →
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 the heart of the white evangelical Christian movement. Inspired by Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man the same way Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World andRead More →
I am grateful being adopted as a toddler and having an early life of mostly fond memories. My adoptive mother had passed, and my adoptive father remarried. I had a good career and a family of my own. But, being adopted nagged at me. I learned that I had aRead More →
When a family secret comes to light, lives are changed forever in this honest, beautiful, and sometimes painful memoir. When Mark, adopted at birth, set out to find his genetic family as an adult, he found something he never expected–three full-blood siblings, including a persistent sister who would alter theRead More →
On April 27, 1997, four contestants make it to the final cell of the Quigley House, a full-contact haunted escape room in Lincoln, Nebraska, made famous for its monstrosities, booby-traps, and ghoulishly costumed actors. If the group can endure these horrors without shouting the safe word, “reprieve,” they’ll win aRead More →
Three years in to Sri Lanka’s bloody civil war, an abandoned baby ends up in the adopted arms of a white American couple living in a Colombo home that doubles as a CIA safe house. They take him on an extraordinary journey around the globe as he’s launched into theRead More →
A Timeline of the Injustice of Adoption Law traces Australian laws affecting thousands, back to the US theories of eugenics, then back to Britain. It highlights the various notions of ‘the best interests of the child’ in law, over time, and shows how the poor treatment of single mothers cameRead More →
Abandoned by his mother at birth, Kevin was enveloped in a labyrinth of adoption, addiction, and child sexual abuse. By age 20, a shell of the boy he once was, Kevin succumbed completely to a suicidal lifestyle of drug dealing and prostitution. At 45, after many years of recovery, KevinRead More →
A middle-aged man’s search for his biological family. Having lived his whole life thinking about where he came from, while yearning to understand the missing answers to his self-actualization, DNA matches opened the door for him to get answers from genealogical research. With each discovery, the coincidences in his lifeRead More →
Being given away for adoption just days after being born left a mystery around Scott Sullivan’s life that tugged at his analytical mind, fueling a sense of self-doubt throughout his introverted life that affected his friendships, his faith, and amplified his insecurities. Hoping to uncover his past and find hisRead More →
“Like a jigsaw puzzle, every story is made up of pieces; big ones, smaller ones, pieces not easily found, tiny and hiding, essential to complete the picture.” At almost seventy years old, Edward Di Gangi had never given much thought to the fact he was adopted. However, a cemetery visitRead More →
Family Resemblance is a multiyear photo project that documents and celebrates people who are genetically related and bear a strong resemblance to each other. As an adopted person, photographer Eric Mueller always wondered how it would feel to look like someone else. At age forty-five, when he saw a photoRead More →
During the Baby Boom in 1960s America, women were encouraged to stay home and raise large families, but sex and childbirth were taboo subjects. Premarital sex was common, but birth control was hard to get and abortion was illegal. In 1961, sixteen-year-old Margaret Erle fell in love and became pregnant.Read More →
Paul Kimball, a biracial adoptee, explores his own abandonment issues as he searches and eventually reunites with his birth parents. After a seemingly joyous reunion, his birth mother, a Caucasian professional cellist, rejects him. This causes him to seek out his Armenian birth father who, along with his extended family,Read More →
In his third DC Books title, Ghost Face, Greg Santos explores what it means to have been a Cambodian infant adopted by a Canadian family. Through a uniquely playful and self-reflective series of poems that pay moving homage to his adoptive parents, and explore the fantasies of a lost family andRead More →
I Met Myself in October: A Memoir of Belonging is a thought-provoking true adventure discussing international/transracial adoption and what it means to belong to two countries and two families. Taylor-Mosquera weaves together the intricacies of struggling to belong to the Black and Latinx communities in the United States while enjoyingRead More →
Rooted in Adoption: A Collection of Adoptee Reflections is a collection of short narratives from those who have been adopted. Adoptees of various ages, backgrounds, and experiences were asked discuss the joys of adoption and the struggles of living a life of secrecy and lost identity. Rooted in Adoption elevatesRead More →
This is an adoption story of two people; a birth mother and a son who briefly meet on a turbulent afternoon in 1967 in Flint, Michigan. They spend the next half century separated by a few miles and a million regrets. Various circumstances keep them apart until a random phoneRead More →
A gifted young man endured a tormented childhood at the hands of his mentally troubled adoptive mother. Told that his birth mother had died to give him life, he shouldered the blame yet still found the strength to attempt the impossible. With a week’s worth of clothes and a guitar,Read More →
Matt Kim is always tired. He keeps passing out. His cat is dead. His wife and daughter have left him. He’s estranged from his adoptive family. People bump into him on the street as if he isn’t there. He is pretty sure he’s disappearing. His girlfriend, Yumi, is less convinced.Read More →
In kindergarten, Jarrett Krosoczka’s teacher asks him to draw his family, with a mommy and a daddy. But Jarrett’s family is much more complicated than that. His mom is an addict, in and out of rehab, and in and out of Jarrett’s life. His father is a mystery — JarrettRead More →
Tony was taken in at the age of three by Mary Hynes and Janet Simons, after being separated from his mother, who suffered from schizophrenia. After that time, he was shuffled in and out of his grandmothers home before being placed in an orphanage, where he remained for one year.Read More →
How does a government steal a child and then imprison him? How does it keep it a secret? This story is how. At the age of seventeen, after a childhood in a foster family followed by six years in care homes, Norman Greenwood was given his birth certificate. He learnedRead More →
Forbidden Love is the true story of Father William Grau, a black Catholic priest, and Sister Sophie Legocki, a white Polish-American nun who, in the segregated fifties, defied the church and society with their passionate secret love affair that lasted for nearly a decade and produced a son, Joe Steele.Read More →
An inspirational book detailing the profound changes in the life of a black child being left at a hospital after birth. Thirteen months into his life being adopted by a white couple that migrated from Europe before World War II, who would later adopt over twenty children with different nationalities.Read More →
“Who Am I Really?” is a question many adoptees ask when they realize they have another family of genetic relation. Damon L. Davis shares his journey through life as an adoptee to becoming an adoptive parent himself. He explores his desire to find his birth family as sparked by theRead More →
In Blackbirds, Greg Santos delves into the raw, private mythologies of parenthood, adoption, ethnicity, and uncertain histories. These lyrical poems bring us from Lisbon’s winding ways, to cramped Paris quarters and sacred spaces, to Cambodian street markets–all those rooms, wombs, and ruins that make up a complicated and poignant personalRead More →
Like many adoptees, Don Anderson wanted to know where he came from. But would he be setting himself up for disappointment by searching? Would he discover parents who were not alive—or worse, parents who didn’t want to know him? Would he be able to find them at all? Paper andRead More →
This book investigates the experiences of South Koreans adopted into Western families and the complexity of what it means to ‘feel identity’ beyond what is written in official adoption files. Korean Adoptees and Transnational Adoption is based on ethnographic fieldwork in South Korea and interviews with adult Korean adoptees fromRead More →
The poems in Black Steel Magnolias in the Hour of Chaos Theory interrogate identity, family, loneliness, and the expectations of masculinity. Using dreams, blues, and a chorus of voices, this collection of poems examines the complexities of intimacy for an adopted person trying to find balance between two families–one rattledRead More →