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 from her true story of growing up as the adopted Black daughter of white parents and the fictional story ofRead More →
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 out there who looks like me, talks like me and thinks like me?” As an adoptee, a birth mother, andRead More →
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 nighttime ritual of checking under her bed each night, not sure who she was afraid of finding. An intruder? ARead 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 →
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 pull to learn more about her medical history sends her on an unexpected journey. Kathe isn’t interested in learning herRead More →
I Must Have Wandered, a rich hybrid memoir, is a collage of lyrical prose, letters, fragments, vignettes, images, and resources. Born and relinquished in 1951 South Carolina, a baby girl is adopted by a career Air Force couple. Having felt both the primal wound, and ongoing separation, she comes of ageRead More →
Renewed courage after learning the final piece of my true heritage has overcome my life-long fear of telling my story. Every adoptee has the right, and many the need, to discover her or his true history, ancestry and identity. Knowledge gives power and confidence. With our truths, we can recoverRead More →
Pam Cates had led a charmed life. As a mother, wife, daughter, sister, and artist, she had everything she’d always dreamed of–a big house in the country, a wonderful husband, lovely daughter, her parents living next door, and time to paint and garden. She always knew she was adopted 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 →
“Our adopted angel”–that’s what Danielle’s adoptive parents called her. She grew up adored, doted on, unconditionally loved. It wasn’t until she was in college that she first felt a gnawing curiosity about her roots. From time to time, she would wonder: Where did this face come from? Where did thisRead More →
When Emma learns her birth mother wrote and signed a letter about her to the adoption agency, she knew she had to have that letter if she were to ever discover her birth mother’s true identity. Her birth mother had used a fictitious name at the maternity home and usedRead 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 →
This is the story of a brave little girl on a quest for adventure, love and belonging. Jenny Rossiter has spent decades encouraging others to improve their lives. In this book she peels back the layers of her own life in a bid to connect with herself. Her journey ofRead More →
Finding My Way Home is a journey. It is a journey across the ocean, across the country, and out of the adoptee fog. The roadmap that was hidden away by a 1970s closed adoption is unearthed, and the trail begins to clear. It leads not only to place, but toRead More →
Laurie James spent most of her life wondering what it means to belong; loneliness dictated the choices she made. She rarely shared this secret with others, however; it was always hidden behind a carefree and can-do attitude. When she’s in her mid-forties, Laurie’s mother has a heart attack and herRead 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 →
Years after being taken away from her birth parents as a baby by the state and then being adopted out of the foster care system at age four, singer-songwriter Jenni Alpert decided to search for her birth father with the help of a private investigator, resumed her birth name “Cami” toRead More →
American Bastard is a lyrical inquiry into the experience of being a bastard in America. This memoir travels across literal continents–and continents of desire as Beatty finds her birthfather, a Canadian hockey player who’s won three Stanley Cups–and her birthmother, a working-class woman from Pittsburgh. This is not the whitewashed story,Read More →
Mary Gauthier was twelve years old when she was given her Aunt Jenny’s old guitar and taught herself to play with a Mel Bay basic guitar workbook. Music offered her a window to a world where others felt the way she did. Songs became lifelines to her, and she longedRead More →
From the 1940s through the 1960s, young pregnant women entered the front door of a clinic in a small North Georgia town. Sometimes their babies exited out the back, sold to northern couples who were desperate to hold a newborn in their arms. But these weren’t adoptions–they were transactions. AndRead More →
“‘I live at the end of a gravel road at the top of a valley consumed by bush. My husband is here, and my three girls. But the bush swallows them up like the road.’ I wrote those words at the kitchen table in 1983. A letter to the motherRead 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 →
Born in 1958 and given up for adoption Julia’s story is an exploration of a search for love, belonging and identity. It is a story of relinquishment and reunion, of trauma and hope. It is a tale of overcoming addiction and learning to live with becoming real. This is aRead More →
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 to rethink the legacies of the un-ended Korean War and re-evaluate the foundational role that Korean military wives and adoptionRead 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 →
Shortly before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, adoptee Megan Culhane Galbraith was born in a Catholic charity hospital in New York City to a teenaged resident of the Guild of the Infant Saviour, a home for unwed mothers. Decades later, on the eve of becoming a mother herself, she would travel toRead More →
Julie is adopted. She is also a twin. Because their adoption was closed, she and her sister lack both a health history and their adoption papers―which becomes an issue for Julie when, at forty-eight years old, she finds herself facing several serious health issues. To launch the probe into herRead More →
Growing up, Susan always felt something was missing in her life. Then, at age sixteen, her parents finally told her their Big Secret. Susan was adopted. With no information regarding her birth family, but with hope and determination, Susan ventured into the unknown to put together the pieces of her own personal puzzle. TheRead 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 →