-
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…
-
Lost Daughters: Writing Adoption from a Place of Empowerment & Peace
Edited by Amanda H.L. Transue-Woolston, Julie Stromberg, Karen Pickell, and Jennifer Anastasi
A collection of writings by the authors of the Lost Daughters blog. The Lost Daughters mission is to bring readers the perspectives and narratives of adopted women, and to highlight their strength, resiliency, and wisdom. Editors: Amanda H.L. Transue-Woolston, Julie Stromberg, Karen Pickell, Jennifer Anastasi Adoptee Authors: Jennifer…
-
mami calls me gabriella
by Doriana Gabrielle Diaz
mami calls me gabriella is a collection of poetry written during Doriana’s trip to Puerto Rico from 07/07/18 – 07/14/18 to meet her birth mother and birth family for the first time. Adoptee Author: Doriana Gabrielle Diaz Publication Year: 2018 Critical Reviews: Adoptee Reviews: Other Reviews: All…
-
Marilyn
by Amanda Ngoho Reavey
Amanda [Ngoho] Reavey’s first book, Marilyn, began as an exploration through somatic experiments on what it means to stay and became a fragmented map of the immigration system, the international adoption process, and family. How do you articulate disenfranchised grief? How does a person who…
-
Mirrors Made of Ink
by Shannon Quist
A collection of sixty poems spanning moments across a lifetime, Mirrors Made of Ink focuses on the emotional catastrophe of adoption. Quist muses with varied style on family, existence, and the liminal space between two lives in pieces that narrate a lonely path of discovery amidst a…
-
Mixed Korean: Our Stories
Edited by Cerrissa Kim, Sora Kim-Russell, Mary-Kim Arnold, Katherine Kim
From the struggles of the Korean War, to the modern dilemmas faced by those who are mixed race, comes an assortment of stories that capture the essence of what it is to be a mixed Korean. With common themes of exclusion, and recollections of not…
-
Not My White Savior: A Memoir in Poems
by Julayne Lee
Julayne Lee was born in South Korea to a mother she never knew. When she was an infant, she was adopted by a white Christian family in Minnesota, where she was sent to grow up. Not My White Savior is a memoir in poems, exploring what it…
-
Omma, Sea of Joy and Other Astrological Signs
by Bo Schwabacher
This remarkable book illuminates Schwabacher’s adopted Korean experience: trauma, discovery, reassemblage. She is brave enough to not flinch at the dark parts and talented enough to render them into a gorgeous, singular art. The anti-fairy tale has been made new. It is a splayed open…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption
Edited by Jane Jeong Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah, and Sun Yung Shin
Many adoptees are required to become people that they were never meant to be. While transracial adoption tends to be considered benevolent, it often exacts a heavy emotional, cultural, and economic toll on those who directly experience it. Outsiders Within is a landmark publication that carefully…
-
Paper Pavilion
by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs
Winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Paper Pavilion captures the theme of transnational adoption and a powerful search for a personal history and identity from Korea to America. Adoptee Author: Jennifer Kwon Dobbs Publication Year: 2007 Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews: Other Reviews: All Bookshop and Amazon…
-
Perpetual Child: Dismantling the Stereotype
Edited by Diane René Christian and Amanda H.L. Transue-Woolston
A collection of stories, poems, and essays aimed at confronting the “perpetual child” stereotype faced by adult adoptees. The pieces contained within this anthology implore readers to look deeply into their own ideas about what it means to be adopted and to empathize with the…
-
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…
-
R.A.W.
by Patience Agbabi
First poetry collection by UK poet Patience Agbabi. Portions of the collection are reportedly autobiographical. Adoptee Author: Patience Agbabi Publication Year: 1995 Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews: Other Reviews: All Bookshop and Amazon links on this site are affiliate links. We earn a small commission to help keep…
-
Requitements
by Rosemary Starace
Poems and an essay. Adoptee Author: Rosemary Starace Publication Year: 2015 (revised edition; originally published 2010) Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews: Other Reviews: All Bookshop and Amazon links on this site are affiliate links. We earn a small commission to help keep Adoptee Reading running whenever items are…
-
Season of Dares
by Leah Silvieus
Season of Dares leans into fragments of the scriptures, narratives and mythologies of a Korean adoptee’s childhood in the rural American West. Fearlessly, it revisits and explores the physical and spiritual landscapes of those communities and the tensions between the impulses that shaped them–violence and…
-
Shadows of a Dark-Alley Adoptee: An Adoptee’s Search for Self
by Wendy Barkett
A book of thoughts and poems from an adoptee who attempts to find the truth which is masked by lies. Her lonely travels through a world that feels dark. At times she finds a friend to ride along in this journey called life. Adoptee Author: Wendy…
-
Silent Voices
by Carlynne Hershberger
The story of adoption is seldom told from the natural mother’s point of view. Eleven full color paintings with narrative poetry tell a story of loss, longing, power, powerlessness, surrender, grief, family and meaning. It represents the spiritual and physical connection that women have with…
-
Sleeps with Knives
by Laramie Harlow
Utterly raw, painfully true poems about adoption, child abuse, life in Wisconsin and Native American history. The poetry collection includes song lyrics from the author’s time as a musician. This is Laramie Harlow’s (Tsalgi-Shawnee-Euro) first chapbook. Adoptee Author: Laramie Harlow (aka Trace A. DeMeyer, Lara Trace…
-
Spot the Terrorist!
by Lori Jakiela
Lori Jakiela’s Spot the Terrorist! takes the reader on flights through the ordinary-turned-extraordinary, where the everyday experiences of a flight attendant become something much stranger and wilder. Adoptee Author: Lori Jakiela Publication Year: 2012 Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews: Other Reviews: All Bookshop and Amazon links on this…
-
Telling Tales
by Patience Agbabi
In Telling Tales, award-winning poet Patience Agbabi presents an inspired 21st-century remix of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, retelling all of the stories, from the Miller’s Tale to the Wife of Bath’s, in her own critically acclaimed poetic style. Celebrating Chaucer’s Middle-English masterwork for its performance element…
-
The Adoption Papers
by Jackie Kay
Jackie Kay tells the story of a black girl’s adoption by a white Scottish couple- from three different viewpoints: the mother, the birth mother, and the daughter. Adoptee Author: Jackie Kay Publication Year: 1991 Critical Reviews Adoptee Reviews: Other Reviews: All Bookshop and Amazon links on this…
-
The Girl in the Mirror: A Novel in Poems and Journal Entries
by Meg Kearney
An adopted teen’s search for her birth mother is overshadowed by a wrenching loss, dramatically told through her poems and journals. Lizzie McLane, the adopted poet-heroine of the widely acclaimed The Secret of Me, is now a high school senior, excited about her future: meeting boys,…
-
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…
-
The Secret of Me: A Novel in Poems
by Meg Kearney
The acclaimed story of an adopted teenager’s quest to find her place among family, friends, and the wider world. Fourteen-year old Lizzie, as well as her older brother and sister, were adopted as infants. But facts are not feelings, and what it feels like to…
-
The Translation of Han
by Hei Kyong Kim
The Translation of Han is a collection of poetry and prose about the spiritual, psychological, personal and political aspects of historical and intergenerational trauma amongst a people; it explores issues of race, adoption, culture, gender, lateral oppression, violence, love, family, and grief and loss. It…
-
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…
Including More Than 450 Adoptee-Recommended Titles!
