Category: Male Adoptees
-
Who’s Wally?: Adoption, Brian, and Me
by Andy Wallis
Andy Wallis was born as David in 1973; he was surplus to requirements and given up for adoption. Growing up, his adoption was never something he really thought about. It had happened to that boy called David, whom he felt no connection to. Delving deeper…
-
In Praise of Late Wonder
by Lee Herrick
In his most personal collection of poems to date, California Poet Laureate Lee Herrick writes with openness about his adoption from Korea in more than 25 new memoir-like prose poems. This expansive collection also includes a section of new poems, as well as highlights from…
-
Adoption and Suicidality: An Anthology of Stories, Poems, and Resources for Adoptees, Families, Healthcare Professionals, and Allies
by Beth Syverson and Joseph Nakao; foreword by Dr. Joyce Maguire Pavao
This book is a wake-up call to those impacted by adoption and to those who interact with them. According to preliminary results of a groundbreaking study out of Winston-Salem State University (final report targeted for release in 2025), adopted people are 36.7 times more likely…
-
Lucky Bastard
by Anthony Akerman
When he was ten years old, the author was told he’d been adopted. It was a seismic event that turned his world upside down. Nobody was who he thought they were. His mother wasn’t his mother; his father wasn’t his father; his sister wasn’t his…
-
Tell No One
by Brendan Watkins
A stunning memoir of one man’s search for his birth parents, which uncovered an astonishing global scandal at the heart of the Catholic Church. Brendan Watkins was eight years old when his parents told him he was adopted. When he was in his late twenties,…
-
The Adoptee’s Journey: From Loss and Trauma to Healing and Empowerment
by Cameron Lee Small
Adoption is often framed by happy narratives, but the reality is that many adoptees struggle with unaddressed trauma and issues of identity and belonging. Adoptees often spend the majority of their youth without the language to explore the grief related to adoption or the permission…
-
Crazy Bastard: A Memoir of Forced Adoption
by Abraham Maddison
Derek Pedley abandons his thirty-year journalism career on the brink of a breakdown, haunted by addiction, compulsion, and obsession, and carrying the heavy baggage of a boy who found his adoption papers at fifteen. When an anguished letter his mother wrote almost half a century…
-
Surrounding Sparky: A Gift of Life
by Brad Livingood
The story of one man’s journey to unearth his roots while navigating the complexities of a 1950s adoption, told through the backdrop of American history, raising a young family, and the advent of social media and modern DNA testing. Serendipitous twists and turns are all…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
You’ll Always Be White To Me: A Memoir
by Garon Wade
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…
-
A Timeline of the Injustice of Adoption Law
by Darryl Nelson
A Timeline of the Injustice of Adoption Law traces Australian laws affecting thousands, back to the US theories of eugenics, then back to Britain. It highlights the various notions of ‘the best interests of the child’ in law, over time, and shows how the poor…
-
Dear Stephen Michael’s Mother: A Memoir
by Kevin Barhydt
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…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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,…
-
American Baby: A Mother, a Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption
by Gabrielle Glaser
During the Baby Boom in 1960s America, women were encouraged to stay home and raise large families, but sex and childbirth were taboo subjects. Premarital sex was common, but birth control was hard to get and abortion was illegal. In 1961, sixteen-year-old Margaret Erle fell…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…