Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!

Category: Adoptee Author

  • When We Become Ours: A YA Adoptee Anthology

    When We Become Ours: A YA Adoptee Anthology

    Edited by Shannon Gibney and Nicole Chung

    There is no universal adoption experience, and no two adoptees have the same story. This anthology for teens edited by Shannon Gibney and Nicole Chung contains a wide range of powerful, poignant, and evocative stories in a variety of genres. These tales from fifteen bestselling,…

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  • Recycled: A Reluctant Search for True Self Through Nurture, Nature, and Free Will

    Recycled: A Reluctant Search for True Self Through Nurture, Nature, and Free Will

    by Jack F. Rocco MD

    Jack Rocco was a baby when he was adopted by a blue-collar, Italian American family. Today a successful orthopedic surgeon, Jack’s identity was built around his Italian heritage and while he knew the story of his “Gotday,” he didn’t know the story of his birth…

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  • Not Nicholson: The Story of a First Daughter, An Adoption Search and Reunion Memoir

    Not Nicholson: The Story of a First Daughter, An Adoption Search and Reunion Memoir

    by Ann M. Haralambie

    This is a story about family, adoption, heritage, and identity. It is also about place and people. Haralambie invites you to accompany her on her search for her biological roots, the hurdles and misdirections, and what happens when she finally finds out who her biological…

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  • A Fire Is Coming

    A Fire Is Coming

    by Emma Stevens

    The true story of when Emma Stevens learned her new next-door neighbor was a psychologist, she innocently asked about how to find a therapist for her own issues. Dr. Carol Brenner decided to accept her as a patient. Against a backdrop of the Laguna Beach…

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  • Found: Adopted Friends Search for their Birth Families

    Found: Adopted Friends Search for their Birth Families

    by Trish Diggins and Sherri Craig-Evans

    Lifelong friends–both adoptees–decided they would take a chance and search for their birth parents using online DNA kits and social media. It turns out, that was the easy part. What happened over the next five years was much more difficult–trying to forge relationships with a…

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  • Phantom Parents: Memoir of an Adoptee

    Phantom Parents: Memoir of an Adoptee

    by David Enker

    An unusual adoption, a gruesome family discovery, a lonesome journey through North America, a miraculous death escape at the 7/7 bombings in the London Underground and a life-altering diagnosis are just some of the ingredients in this collection of short stories and illustrations. This book will…

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  • Sanctuaries

    Sanctuaries

    by Vince Sgambati

    Gianni, a gay adoptee, comes of age in a time when adoption and same-sex love are not easily discussed or accepted. Sanctuaries is a tender story of love and healing, set against the larger turmoil of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, Stonewall, and the…

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  • Landlock X: Poems

    Landlock X: Poems

    by Sarah Audsley

    Sarah Audsley’s debut poetry collection, Landlock X, joins a growing body of adoptee poetics. By examining the consequences of the international transracial adoptee experience–her own–Audsley’s collection finds more questions than solid answers. Employing a variety of poetic forms, co-opting the pastoral tradition to argue for belonging…

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  • Monstrous: A Transracial Adoption Story

    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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  • You Should Be Grateful: Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption

    You Should Be Grateful: Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption

    by Angela Tucker

    Angela Tucker is a Black woman, adopted from foster care by white parents. She has heard this microaggression her entire life, usually from well-intentioned strangers who view her adoptive parents as noble saviors. She is grateful for many aspects of her life, but being transracially…

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  • A Living Remedy: A Memoir

    A Living Remedy: A Memoir

    by Nicole Chung

    Nicole Chung couldn’t hightail it out of her overwhelmingly white Oregon hometown fast enough. As a scholarship student at a private university on the East Coast, no longer the only Korean she knew, she found community and a path to the life she’d long wanted.…

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  • Do You Know Who I Am? An Infantryman’s Adoption Story of Finding Family after Fifty

    Do You Know Who I Am? An Infantryman’s Adoption Story of Finding Family after Fifty

    by Christopher E. Harvey

    Infantryman Christopher Harvey’s childhood ended at twelve years old when his mom casually told him that he was adopted. Consequently, adulthood for him began when he met his birth mother after he turned fifty. And he describes the thirty-eight years in between as a purgatory…

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  • Coloring & Journal Book For Adoptees With Motivational Quotes: For Adoptees Healing Journey – Volume 1

    Coloring & Journal Book For Adoptees With Motivational Quotes: For Adoptees Healing Journey – Volume 1

    by Angel Davis; illustrated by Angie McGahey

    As an adult adoptee that struggles with the seven core issues of being adopted, (loss, rejection, guilt and shame, grief, identity, intimacy, and mastery/control), I have created this therapeutic coloring book with motivational uplifting quotes and affirmations, original illustrations and patterns, and journaling pages to…

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  • Swear, Vent & Coloring Book For (very) F*cking Angry Adoptees: For Adoptees Healing Journey – Volume 1

    Swear, Vent & Coloring Book For (very) F*cking Angry Adoptees: For Adoptees Healing Journey – Volume 1

    by Angel Davis; illustrated by Angie McGahey

    Why an angry sweary coloring and journal book? Because punching people in the face is frowned upon, and anger isn’t great for your overall mental and physical health if you hold on to it–so just let it all out! As an adult adoptee that struggles…

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  • Finding Out: Coming to Terms with Adoption

    Finding Out: Coming to Terms with Adoption

    by Paula Wilson

    Thanks to my wonderful parents, there is a story to be told about an airman and his wife. Those people, who took a chance, went through an arduous process never taken before by an American to open their hearts and home to a two-year-old orphan…

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  • Where the Fuck is My Mother?: A Book for Grown-Up Adoptees

    Where the Fuck is My Mother?: A Book for Grown-Up Adoptees

    by Annie O

    Gritty depiction of an adopted girl’s journey into adulthood starting in 1970s New Zealand. Annie’s story unearths the dark truths about adoption while shedding light on the fact that it’s not always what it’s made out to be, juxtaposed in this beautifully presented children’s-style book…

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  • Planted by Love: Beauty for Ashes Through Finding My Birth Mother

    Planted by Love: Beauty for Ashes Through Finding My Birth Mother

    by Linda S. Congdon

    When I was a small child in the early 1950’s, my adoptive parents read me a story book about a mother and father going to a special place and choosing a child to become part of their family. The emphasis of this story conveyed that…

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  • Seoulmates

    Seoulmates

    by Jen Frederick

    When Hara Wilson lands in Seoul to find her birth mother, she doesn’t plan on falling in love with the first man she lays eyes on, but Choi Yujun is irresistible. If his broad shoulders and dimples weren’t enough, Choi Yujun is the most genuine,…

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  • Lions Roaring Far From Home: An Anthology by Ethiopian Adoptees

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

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

    by Shannon Gibney

    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…

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  • The Sense of Wonder

    The Sense of Wonder

    by Matthew Salesses

    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…

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

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

    Jill Uchiyama

    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 unknown thoughts, dreams, and imagination of the adoptee forced to adapt to a new family…

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

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

    by Anna Anderson

    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…

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  • Truth and Agency: Writing Ideas For People Who Were Adopted

    Truth and Agency: Writing Ideas For People Who Were Adopted

    by Anne Heffron

    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 of the uprooted. It can be a struggle to feel fully human when you don’t…

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  • Jules Fae: A Story of Adoption and Reunion

    Jules Fae: A Story of Adoption and Reunion

    by Terrie Novak

    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 by her family, Claire turns to Child Horizons adoption agency. They’ll help her and the…

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  • Person, Perceived Girl

    Person, Perceived Girl

    by A. A. Vincent

    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 Publication Year: 2022 Critical Reviews: Adoptee Reviews:  Other Reviews:  All Bookshop and Amazon links on…

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  • Everyone Hates Kelsie Miller

    Everyone Hates Kelsie Miller

    by Meredith Ireland

    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 friend, Briana, moves across the country and stops speaking to her, she’ll do anything, even…

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  • Where We Come From

    Where We Come From

    by Diane Wilson, Sun Yung Shin, Shannon Gibney, John Coy; Illustrated by Dion MBD

    In this unique collaboration, four authors lyrically explore where they each come from―literally and metaphorically―as well as what unites all of us as humans. Richly layered illustrations connect past and present, making for an accessible and visually striking look at history, family, and identity. We…

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  • Under My Bed and Other Essays

    Under My Bed and Other Essays

    by Jody Keisner

    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…

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  • Voices Unheard: A Reflective Journal for Adult Adoptees

    Voices Unheard: A Reflective Journal for Adult Adoptees

    by Lisa Coppola

    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 the actuality of childhood relinquishment to be minimized or unheard by others who are not…

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