Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!

Category: Adoptee Author

  • Memoirs of an Adoptee: One Person’s DNA Discoveries, Reflections and Insights

    Memoirs of an Adoptee: One Person’s DNA Discoveries, Reflections and Insights

    by Craig Harris

    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,…

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  • The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book

    The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book

    by Megan Culhane Galbraith

    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…

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  • Twice a Daughter: A Search for Identity, Family, and Belonging

    Twice a Daughter: A Search for Identity, Family, and Belonging

    by Julie Ryan McGue

    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…

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  • The Lonely Child: The Journey of Search to Find My Biological Family

    The Lonely Child: The Journey of Search to Find My Biological Family

    by Susan Moyer

    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…

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  • The Heart Of The Matter: EMDR Through An Adoptee’s Eyes

    The Heart Of The Matter: EMDR Through An Adoptee’s Eyes

    by Maya Luque with Kate Mounts

    This book is a personal reflection on how EMDR Therapy helped one adoptee through a personal journey of acceptance and healing. As one of the girls adopted from China in the early 1990s, author and illustrator Maya Luque has had her life changed by EMDR…

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  • Cleave

    Cleave

    by Tiana Nobile

    In her debut collection, Tiana Nobile grapples with the history of transnational adoption, both her own from South Korea and the broader, collective experience. In conversation with psychologist Harry Harlow’s monkey experiments and utilizing fragments of a highly personal cache of documents from her own…

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  • Searching For Me: An Adoptee’s Journey of Faith, Family, and Belonging

    Searching For Me: An Adoptee’s Journey of Faith, Family, and Belonging

    by Scott Sullivan

    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…

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  • The Gift Best Given: A Memoir

    The Gift Best Given: A Memoir

    by Edward Di Gangi

    “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…

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  • Family Resemblance: Finding Yourself in Others

    Family Resemblance: Finding Yourself in Others

    by Eric Mueller

    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,…

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  • Unnatural Selection: A Memoir of Adoption and Wilderness

    Unnatural Selection: A Memoir of Adoption and Wilderness

    by Andrea Ross; foreword by Miriam Peskowitz

    Adopted at birth, Andrea Ross grew up inhabiting two ecosystems: one was her tangible, adoptive family, the other her birth family, whose mysterious landscape was hidden from her. In this coming-of-age memoir, Ross narrates how in her early twenties, while working as a ranger in Grand Canyon National Park, she…

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  • Surviving the White Gaze: A Memoir

    Surviving the White Gaze: A Memoir

    by Rebecca Carroll

    Rebecca Carroll grew up the only black person in her rural New Hampshire town. Adopted at birth by artistic parents who believed in peace, love, and zero population growth, her early childhood was loving and idyllic—and yet she couldn’t articulate the deep sense of isolation…

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  • Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

    Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping

    by Matthew Salesses

    The traditional writing workshop was established with white male writers in mind; what we call craft is informed by their cultural values. In this bold and original examination of elements of writing–including plot, character, conflict, structure, and believability–and aspects of workshop–including the silenced writer and…

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  • We Are All Human Beings: An Adoptee Ponders

    We Are All Human Beings: An Adoptee Ponders

    by Paul Kimball

    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,…

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  • The How and the Why

    The How and the Why

    by Cynthia Hand

    Cassandra McMurtrey has the best parents a girl could ask for; they’ve given Cass a life she wouldn’t trade for the world. She has everything she needs—but she has questions, too. Like, to know who she is. Where she came from. Questions her adoptive parents…

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  • Finding Vicki Sue

    Finding Vicki Sue

    by Barbara Saunders Brownell

    Finding Vicki Sue is an engaging memoir full of history and insight which chronicles growing up in South Bend, Indiana as an adoptee in the 1960s and beyond. Fifty-six years after her birth, the author’s adoption file was obtained which explains the missing piece of…

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  • Ohpikiihaakan-ohpihmeh (Raised Somewhere Else): A ’60s Scoop Adoptee’s Story of Coming Home

    Ohpikiihaakan-ohpihmeh (Raised Somewhere Else): A ’60s Scoop Adoptee’s Story of Coming Home

    by Colleen Cardinal

    During the Sixties Scoop, over 20,000 Indigenous children in Canada were removed from their biological families, lands, and culture and trafficked across provinces, borders, and overseas to be raised in non-Indigenous households. Ohpikiihaakan-ohpihmeh delves into the personal and provocative narrative of Colleen Cardinal’s journey growing…

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  • The Presence of Absence: A Story About Busyness, Brokenness, and Being Beloved

    The Presence of Absence: A Story About Busyness, Brokenness, and Being Beloved

    by Linda Hoye

    We wear busyness as a badge of accomplishment and personal success. But when we use it to fill a void, being busy can become an addiction. Busyness helps us feel better—or feel nothing—but the benefit doesn’t come without cost. Adoptee Linda Hoye used it to…

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  • Two Hearts: An Adoptee’s Journey Through Grief to Gratitude

    Two Hearts: An Adoptee’s Journey Through Grief to Gratitude

    by Linda Hoye

    Linda Hoye was in her early twenties when she found herself parentless for the second time. Adopted at five months of age, her heritage, medical history, and access to information about who she was or where she came from was sealed. It was as if…

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  • Ghost Face

    Ghost Face

    by Greg Santos

    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…

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  • I Met Myself in October: A Memoir of Belonging

    I Met Myself in October: A Memoir of Belonging

    by Jacob Taylor-Mosquera

    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…

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  • Faith, Hope & Perseverance: An Adoptee’s Journey To Finding Biological Family

    Faith, Hope & Perseverance: An Adoptee’s Journey To Finding Biological Family

    by Diane Gray

    It is our human right to know who we are. After her adoptive parents passed away, Diane decided to take the DNA plunge to find her biological family. Learn how she found her biological family after years of wondering who she was and why she…

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  • Rooted in Adoption: A Collection of Adoptee Reflections

    Rooted in Adoption: A Collection of Adoptee Reflections

    by Veronica Breaux and Shelby Kilgore

    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…

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  • Before Houdini (2)

    Before Houdini (2)

    by Jeremy Holt; illustrated by John Lucas

    The exciting second volume of the After Houdini saga explores the origins of the elusive master of magic, the man who would become…Houdini. London, 1888. A shadowy killer stalks the streets of London, his appetite for blood unleashed upon the city’s lower classes. To defeat him, MI6…

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  • After Houdini (1)

    After Houdini (1)

    by Jeremy Holt; illustrated by John Lucas and Adrian Crossa

    Harry Houdini, master magician and covert spy for the United States, has been kidnapped. The only man who can save him is his estranged son Josef, who, like his father, knows the power of magic—and how it can be more than just an illusion. Josef…

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  • Everyone Was Falling

    Everyone Was Falling

    by JS Lee

    On the weekend of July Fourth, shots are fired at a twentieth high school reunion in a small US town, killing fifty-six. Three survive. So begins Everyone Was Falling, an empowering novel of friendship and violence on the verge of Trump’s election. Lucy–a queer, Asian…

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  • Looking Into Alice’s Eyes : An Adoption Journey of Loss, Self-Discovery, and Peace

    Looking Into Alice’s Eyes : An Adoption Journey of Loss, Self-Discovery, and Peace

    by Robert L. DuBois

    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…

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  • Permanent Home: A Memoir

    Permanent Home: A Memoir

    by Mary Ellen Gambutti

    In her charming collection, Mary Ellen offers glimpses of adopted life in an Air Force family. We travel from her South Carolina birthplace, through several states, and three years in Tokyo. A taste of permanence is found in their New Jersey home, but her quest…

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  • Adoption’s Hidden History: Steps to Sealing the Records (Vol. 2)

    Adoption’s Hidden History: Steps to Sealing the Records (Vol. 2)

    by Mary S. Payne

    An estimated six million Americans are adopted. The development of laws and regulations facilitating this process has been shrouded in mystery. “Adoption’s Hidden History” is for anyone who has ever been touched by adoption. From Myra Clark Gaines’ nineteenth century court fight for recognition as…

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  • Adoption’s Hidden History: From Native American Tribes to Locked Lives (Vol. 1)

    Adoption’s Hidden History: From Native American Tribes to Locked Lives (Vol. 1)

    by Mary S. Payne

    Adoptions are finalized daily across America. Like the root system of a giant oak, tentacles of its history are submerged in years of human experience. Native Americans adopted children and adults into their tribes before pilgrims settled in the New World. Early-day adoption advocates took…

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  • Shadows of the Night: How One Man Survived the Trauma of Adoption, the Snares of the Music Business, and Found His Birthmother and Seven Sisters

    Shadows of the Night: How One Man Survived the Trauma of Adoption, the Snares of the Music Business, and Found His Birthmother and Seven Sisters

    by D.L. Byron

    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…

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