Category: Adoptee Author
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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
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)
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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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Invisible Boy: A Memoir of Self-Discovery
by Harrison Mooney
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…
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Accidental Sisters: The Story of My 52-Year Wait to Meet My Biological Sibling
by Katherine Linn Caire
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…
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I Must Have Wandered: An Adopted Air Force Daughter Recalls
by Mary Ellen Gambutti
Travel with the author on her quest for identity in her compelling collage hybrid memoir. In a wealth of creative non-fiction prose, archival letters, articles, and photos, she portrays an abandoned newborn girl adopted by an Air Force couple in post-World War II South Carolina.…
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No Returns Without Original Receipt
by Diane McConnell
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…
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The Wet Hex: Poems
by Sun Yung Shin
Personal and environmental violations form the backdrop against which Sun Yung Shin examines questions of grievability, violence, and responsibility in The Wet Hex. Incorporating sources such as her own archival immigration documents, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Christopher Columbus’s journals, and traditional Korean burial rituals, Shin explores the ways that lives are…
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Finding Faith: A Memoirish Novel (The Birth-Fathers’ Club Series)
by Michele Kriegman
Like a twisting double helix of DNA, these two satisfying stories of compelling and complex father-daughter pairs entwine with life-altering surprises. They bring compassion, humor, and understanding to the question of whether it is ever too late for paternal instinct. Each year thousands of men…
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Daughter Reassembled: An Adoption Search and Reunion Memoir
by Pam Cates
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…
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No Names to Be Given
by Julia Brewer Daily
1965. Sandy runs away from home to escape her mother’s abusive boyfriend. Becca falls in love with the wrong man. And Faith suffers a devastating attack. With no support and no other options, these three young, unwed women meet at a maternity home hospital in New Orleans…
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Sleepwalk: A Novel
by Dan Chaon
Sleepwalk’s hero, Will Bear, is a man with so many aliases that he simply thinks of himself as the Barely Blur. At fifty years old, he’s been living off the grid for over half his life. He’s never had a real job, never paid taxes, never…
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Family Found: The DNA Journey
by Douglas M. Dubrish
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…
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Healing Tree: An Adoptee’s Story about Hurting, Healing, and Letting the Light Shine Through
by Danielle Gaudette
“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…
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Probably Ruby
by Lisa Bird-Wilson
This is the story of a woman in search of herself, in every sense. When we first meet Ruby, a Métis woman in her thirties, her life is spinning out of control. She’s angling to sleep with her counselor while also rekindling an old relationship…
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Rooted in Adoption Journal: Adoptee Writing Prompts for Self-Reflection, Discovery, and Healing
by Veronica Breaux
This journal consists of over 50 writing prompts specially created for adoptees. The journal is divided into seven sections: Love and Relationships, Childhood Memories, Difficult Emotions, Listen to Adoptees, Adoption and the Media, Search and Reunion, and Personal Growth. Writing is a powerful way to…
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Growing in the Dark: Adoption Secrecy and Its Consequences
by Janine M. Baer
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…
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The Gathering Place: An Adoptee’s Story
by Emma Stevens
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…
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Dear Me….: Letters to Our Younger Adoptee Selves
Edited by Julia F. Richardson
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 ourselves on the page and know we are real. These are letters of love, hope…
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Already Enough: A Path to Self-Acceptance
by Lisa Olivera
When Lisa Olivera was just a few hours old, her birth mother abandoned her behind a rock near Muir Woods in Northern California. She was found and later adopted. Growing up, Lisa knew she was adopted. She later learned she was abandoned. Like with many…
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Love & Genetics: A True Story of Adoption, Surrogacy, and the Meaning of Family
by Mark MacDonald and Rachel Elliott
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…
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Goodbye Hypervigilance: Healing Adoptee Worry
by Lora K. Joy; illustrated by Laura Foote
Goodbye Hypervigilance is a true story about my experience realizing how adoption trauma had put me on high alert my entire life. My need to control things was catastrophic. Luckily, I have an adoptee competent therapist who helped me identify this old coping mechanism. My…
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NoBODY Looks Like Me: An Adoptee Experience
by Lora K. Joy; illustrated by Laura Foote
NoBODY Looks Like Me represents what it is like for an adoptee to grow up in a family where they are not genetically related to anyone. There is a longing to know where your eyes, nose and hands come from. When an adoptee decides to…