Patricia Knight Meyer is an author, speaker, and adoption reform advocate. She was trafficked as an infant along a Texas hospital curb in 1970. No agency. No judge. No paperwork. She was never legally adopted. She grew up with a fraudulent birth certificate and no legal documentation of who she was. The attorney who arranged her placement extorted roughly $30,000 from her raising parents over the years that followed.
Her road to true identity began at 39. She started with no original records, no known birth name, and no confirmed date or place of birth. Using public record databases, she tracked down the trafficking attorney and uncovered a biological cousin trafficked by the same man.
She reunited with both of her birth parents. Her reunion video with her birth father has been viewed more than 280,000 times on YouTube. She received her first legal birth certificate at 47. Patricia tells this story in her debut memoir, WONDERLAND: Memoir of a Black-Market Adoption (Unsolicited Press, November 3, 2026). The book arrives as an IndieReader Award Winner in True Crime, an Eric Hoffer Finalist, a Next Generation Indie Book Award Finalist, and an Indies Today Memoir Finalist. Patricia also narrates the audiobook, released through her imprint YAYDNA Press.
She serves on the board of the National Association of Adoptees and Parents (NAAP), where she hosts the monthly NAAP Happy Hour. She is connected to Concerned United Birthparents, Adoption Knowledge Affiliates, Support Texas Adoptee Rights, Saving Our Sisters, and other advocacy organizations.
Her blog, My Adopted Life, reaches a community of more than 30,000 adoptees and advocates. She keynotes adoption conferences and leads memoir writing workshops. Patricia has appeared on Al Jazeera’s The Stream and HuffPost Live. Her essays have been published in Ms. Magazine, Severance Magazine, Narrative Arc, and Kinsmen Quarterly.
Patricia left high school before graduating, earned her GED, and worked her way through community college. She was admitted to the journalism program at the University of Texas at Austin, where she graduated as a single mother. She went on to a twenty-year career in books and digital marketing.
She is also the founder of YAYDNA Genetic Greeting Cards, cards made for the complicated joy of DNA discovery and reunion, available on Amazon.
She splits her time between the Texas Hill Country and New Orleans with her grumpy Chihuahua, Ollie. She is mom to a photographer daughter and GiGi to two grandsons.
“Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.”
-Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
