Category: Transracial
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Connecting Threads: Five Siblings Lost and Found
by EM Blake
A graphic memoir about siblings of Indigenous and European-American heritage who are taken from their first family, placed in foster care, and most were adopted-a story of the journey to find each other and their first family. This is the story of the complex needs…
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Adoption Fantasies: The Fetishization of Asian Adoptees from Girlhood to Womanhood
by Kimberly D. McKee
In Adoption Fantasies, Kimberly D. McKee explores the ways adopted Asian women and girls are situated at a nexus of objectifications—as adoptees and as Asian American women—and how they negotiate competing expectations based on sensationalist and fictional portrayals of adoption found in US popular culture. McKee…
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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
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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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
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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We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America
by Roxanna Asgarian
The shocking, deeply reported story of a murder-suicide that claimed the lives of six children–and a searing indictment of the American foster care system. On March 26, 2018, rescue workers discovered a crumpled SUV and the bodies of two women and multiple children at the…
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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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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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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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What White Parents Should Know about Transracial Adoption: An Adoptee’s Perspective on Its History, Nuances, and Practices
by Melissa Guida-Richards
If you’re the white parent of a transracially or internationally adopted child, you may have been told that if you try your best and work your hardest, good intentions and a whole lot of love will be enough to give your child the security, attachment,…
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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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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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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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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)
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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Goodbye, SaraJane: A Foster Child Writes Letters to Her Mother
by Sequoya Griffin
Dear Mama Katherine, This is your daughter SaraJane. I know you named me Sequoya at birth and I haven’t seen you since I was ten-years-old. I want you to know that SaraJane is the name my adoptive mother gave me. I was going to look…
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The Son with Two Moms
by Tony Hynes
Tony was taken in at the age of three by Mary Hynes and Janet Simons, after being separated from his mother, who suffered from schizophrenia. After that time, he was shuffled in and out of his grandmothers home before being placed in an orphanage, where…
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Forbidden Love
by Lisa Jones Gentry as told by Joe Steele
Forbidden Love is the true story of Father William Grau, a black Catholic priest, and Sister Sophie Legocki, a white Polish-American nun who, in the segregated fifties, defied the church and society with their passionate secret love affair that lasted for nearly a decade and…
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I Didn’t Know I Was Black Until You Told Me
by Thomas Kirst
An inspirational book detailing the profound changes in the life of a black child being left at a hospital after birth. Thirteen months into his life being adopted by a white couple that migrated from Europe before World War II, who would later adopt over…
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For Black Girls Like Me
by Mariama J. Lockington
Makeda June Kirkland is eleven-years-old, adopted, and black. Her parents and big sister are white, and even though she loves her family very much, Makeda often feels left out. When Makeda’s family moves from Maryland to New Mexico, she leaves behind her best friend, Lena―…
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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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Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption
Susan Devan Harness
In Bitterroot Susan Devan Harness traces her journey to understand the complexities and struggles of being an American Indian child adopted by a white couple and living in the rural American West. When Harness was fifteen years old, she questioned her adoptive father about her “real” parents.…
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All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir
by Nicole Chung
What does it mean to lose your roots―within your culture, within your family―and what happens when you find them? Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. From childhood,…
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Other Words for Grief
by Lisa Marie Rollins
“The poems gathered in Other Words For Grief, are a spotlight turned inward. As Lisa Marie Rollins relentlessly searches the interior with a hot light scanning blood and baby pictures; sexual encounters nearly gone awry as well as family encounters that fall short, we are moved…
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The Lucky Daughter
by Mariama J. Lockington
Poetry. “Mariama J. Lockington’s The Lucky Daughter digs deep into the physicality of moving through this world as a queer woman of color. These poems – about race, sexuality, families (found, formed, and inherited) – are brutal in their honesty and beauty. “a girl” Lockington…
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It’s Not About You: Understanding Adoptee Search, Reunion, and Open Adoption
Edited by Brooke Randolph, MA, NCC, LMHC
The title of this book can be both inflammatory and comforting; different people need to read it different ways. The reality is that the desire for information has nothing to do with parenting or personality, but an innate desire. It’s Not About You is an…
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In The Veins
Edited by Patricia Busbee
Part of this book’s proceeds will support Standing Rock Water Protectors and #NoDAPL. Twenty-eight poets from across Turtle Island contributed, including First Nations poet David Groulx (Anishinabe Elliott Lake); Assiniboine playwright William Yellow Robe; Ojibwe scholar Dr. Carol A. Hand, who wrote an introduction; notable…
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Black Anthology: Adult Adoptees Claim Their Space
Edited by Susan Harris O’Connor, MSW; Diane René Christian; Mei-Mei Akwai Ellerman, PhD
People who identify as Black adoptees are vaguely known within both adoption circles as well as universal discussions. We are just beginning to be introduced to one another. This anthology allows for the opportunity to see the rich diversity of a people; the uniqueness within…
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The Harris Narratives: An Introspective Study of a Transracial Adoptee
by Susan Harris O’Connor
This book consists of five autobiographical narratives by Susan Harris O’Connor, a social worker and transracial adoptee. These monologues were developed and performed around the United States in academic, clinical and child welfare settings to wide acclaim over the last sixteen years. They will be…