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Let Us Be Greater: A Gentle, Guided Path to Healing for Adoptees
by Michelle Madrid
Adoption is a lifeline of support and opportunity for countless people, but it can bring challenges and emotional conditions that are often silenced or left unaddressed, including PTSD, risk of suicide, and fear of abandonment. Author Michelle Madrid has experienced these challenges as a foster…
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Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption
by John McLeod
Adoptions that cross the lines of culture, race, and nation are a major consequence of conflicts around the globe, yet their histories and representations have rarely been considered. Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption is the first critical study to explore narratives of transcultural adoption from contemporary Britain,…
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Lions Roaring Far From Home: An Anthology by Ethiopian Adoptees
Edited by Aselefech Evans, Kassaye Berhanu-MacDonald, and Maureen McCauley
Lions Roaring Far From Home: An Anthology by Ethiopian Adoptees includes the essays and poems of 33 writers, ages 8 to over 50, raised in six countries (the US, Canada, Sweden, France, the Netherlands, and Australia). It is the first ever anthology by Ethiopian adoptees. This…
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Litany for the Long Moment
by Mary-Kim Arnold
The orphan at the center of Litany for the Long Moment is without homeland and without language. In three linked lyric essays, Arnold attempts to claim her own linguistic, cultural, and aesthetic lineage. Born in Korea and adopted to the U.S. as a child, she explores…
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Little Fires Everywhere
by Celeste Ng
From the bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You, a riveting novel that traces the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and the enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives. In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned – from…
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Lost Daughters: Writing Adoption from a Place of Empowerment & Peace
Edited by Amanda H.L. Transue-Woolston, Julie Stromberg, Karen Pickell, and Jennifer Anastasi
A collection of writings by the authors of the Lost Daughters blog. The Lost Daughters mission is to bring readers the perspectives and narratives of adopted women, and to highlight their strength, resiliency, and wisdom. Editors: Amanda H.L. Transue-Woolston, Julie Stromberg, Karen Pickell, Jennifer Anastasi Adoptee Authors: Jennifer…
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Lucky Girl
by Mei-Ling Hopgood
In a true story of family ties, journalist Mei-Ling Hopgood, one of the first wave of Asian adoptees to arrive in America, comes face to face with her past when her Chinese birth family suddenly requests a reunion after more than two decades. In 1974,…
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Marilyn
by Amanda Ngoho Reavey
Amanda [Ngoho] Reavey’s first book, Marilyn, began as an exploration through somatic experiments on what it means to stay and became a fragmented map of the immigration system, the international adoption process, and family. How do you articulate disenfranchised grief? How does a person who…
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Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love
by Xinran (translated from Chinese by Nicky Harman)
Following her internationally bestselling book The Good Women of China, Xinran has written one of the most powerful accounts of the lives of Chinese women. She has gained entrance to the most pained, secret chambers in the hearts of Chinese mothers—students, successful businesswomen, midwives, peasants—who,…
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Mixed Korean: Our Stories
Edited by Cerrissa Kim, Sora Kim-Russell, Mary-Kim Arnold, Katherine Kim
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 is to be a mixed Korean. With common themes of exclusion, and recollections of not…
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Monstrous: A Transracial Adoption Story
by Sarah Myer
Sarah has always struggled to fit in. Born in South Korea and adopted at birth by a white couple, she grows up in a rural community with few Asian neighbors. People whisper in the supermarket. Classmates bully her. She has trouble containing her anger in…
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My Fathers’ Daughter: A Story of Family and Belonging
by Hannah Pool
What do you wear to meet your father for the first time? In 2004, Hannah Pool knew more about next season’s lipstick colors than she did about Africa: a beauty editor for The Guardian newspaper, she juggled lattes and cocktails, handbags and hangouts through her…
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Never Stop Walking: A Memoir of Finding Home Across the World
by Christina Rickardsson; translated by Tara F. Chace
Christiana Mara Coelho was born into extreme poverty in Brazil. After spending the first seven years of her life with her loving mother in the forest caves outside São Paulo and then on the city streets, where they begged for food, she and her younger…
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Not My White Savior: A Memoir in Poems
by Julayne Lee
Julayne Lee was born in South Korea to a mother she never knew. When she was an infant, she was adopted by a white Christian family in Minnesota, where she was sent to grow up. Not My White Savior is a memoir in poems, exploring what it…
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Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.: A Memoir
by Jenny Heijun Wills
Jenny Heijun Wills was born in Korea and adopted as an infant into a white family in small-town Canada. In her late twenties, she reconnected with her first family and returned to Seoul where she spent four months getting to know other adoptees, as well…
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Omma, Sea of Joy and Other Astrological Signs
by Bo Schwabacher
This remarkable book illuminates Schwabacher’s adopted Korean experience: trauma, discovery, reassemblage. She is brave enough to not flinch at the dark parts and talented enough to render them into a gorgeous, singular art. The anti-fairy tale has been made new. It is a splayed open…
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Origin Narratives: The Stories We Tell Children About Immigration and International Adoption
by Macarena García-González
The first of its kind, this volume unpacks the cultural construction of transnational adoption and migration by examining a sample of recent children’s books that address the subject. Of all European countries, Spain is the nation where immigration and transnational adoption have increased most steeply…
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Out of Place: The Lives of Korean Adoptee Immigrants
by SunAh M. Laybourn
Since the early 1950s, over 125,000 Korean children have been adopted in the United States, primarily by white families. Korean adoptees figure in twenty-five percent of US transnational adoptions and are the largest group of transracial adoptees currently in adulthood. Despite being legally adopted, Korean…
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Outer Search Inner Journey
by Peter Dodds
In this riveting memoir a woman in post World War II Germany relinquishes her infant son Peter to an orphanage where he’s adopted by American parents and brought to the United States. Separated from family of origin and ancestral homeland, Peter grows up alienated in…
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Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption
Edited by Jane Jeong Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah, and Sun Yung Shin
Many adoptees are required to become people that they were never meant to be. While transracial adoption tends to be considered benevolent, it often exacts a heavy emotional, cultural, and economic toll on those who directly experience it. Outsiders Within is a landmark publication that carefully…
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Palimpsest: Documents From a Korean Adoption
by Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom
Thousands of South Korean children were adopted around the world in the 1970s and 1980s. More than nine thousand found their new home in Sweden, including the cartoonist Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom, who was adopted when she was two years old. Throughout her childhood she struggled…
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Paper Pavilion
by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs
Winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Paper Pavilion captures the theme of transnational adoption and a powerful search for a personal history and identity from Korea to America. Adoptee Author: Jennifer Kwon Dobbs Publication Year: 2007 Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews: Other Reviews: All Bookshop and Amazon…
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Parenting As Adoptees
Edited by Adam Chau and Kevin Ost-Vollmers
Through fourteen chapters, the authors of Parenting As Adoptees give readers a glimpse into a pivotal phase in life that touches the experiences of many domestic and international adoptees–that of parenting. The authors, who are all adoptees from various walks of life, intertwine their personal…
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Perpetual Child: Dismantling the Stereotype
Edited by Diane René Christian and Amanda H.L. Transue-Woolston
A collection of stories, poems, and essays aimed at confronting the “perpetual child” stereotype faced by adult adoptees. The pieces contained within this anthology implore readers to look deeply into their own ideas about what it means to be adopted and to empathize with the…
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Practically Still a Virgin: An Adoption Memoir
by Monica Hall
During Alaska’s rough-and-tumble 1970s oil boom, a time when prostitution, violence, and lawlessness reigned, Monica Hall rebels against her strict Catholic parents in a downward spiral of delinquency. Overwhelmed by guilt and shame when the unthinkable happens, Hall is forced to make impossible choices. Will…
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Red Dust Road
by Jackie Kay
From the moment when, as a little girl, she realizes that her skin is a different colour from that of her beloved mum and dad, to the tracing and finding of her birth parents, her Highland mother and Nigerian father, Jackie Kay’s journey in Red…
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Reprieve
by James Han Mattson
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…
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Ripped at the Root: An Adoption Story
by Mary Cardaras
“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…
Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!
