This past March, I attended my first Association of Writing Professionals (AWP) event in Los Angeles, and came away with a bag of new books by adoptees or with adoption themes, each of which I highlight here in this list of Eggcellent Adoption Books for Spring Reading list.
My first AWP, I had many reasons to attend, but the “Fighting Tropes, Changing Narratives: BIPOC Adoptee Writers Break Out” featuring several of my favorite adoptee authors topped my list. Moderated by adoptee Susan Ito, author of “I Would Meet You Anywhere,” the panel included Angela Tucker, author of “You Should Be Grateful,” Shannon Gibney, author of “The Girl I Am, Was and Never Will Be: A Speculative Memoir of Transracial Adoption,” Alice Stephens, author of “Famous Adopted People,” and Ansley Moon, author of “Register the Missing” (forthcoming from Kaya Press).
The panel and reading were amazing (of course), and when Susan asked for a show of adoptees in the audience, at least half the hands in the room flew up. With Alice’s book the only one missing from my book shelf, I came away with a copy of “Famous Adopted People” and an invitation to join my fellow adoptee writers for an early dinner.
There I made a handful of new adoptee friends and connected with Sasha Hom, an adoptee and author of “sidework” published by Black Lawrence Press. She just happened to be headed to the same offsite reading I was, so we bopped over to the event together. To my surprise, Sasha would read from her novella “sidework,” which is about a Korean American adoptee who waits tables while living in a 14-passenger van with her husband and her four homeschooled children.
Back at the conference, I tried my hardest to visit the 800 plus exhibitors, which included many small presses, and the folks at Blair Publishing who shortlisted my “WONDERLAND” manuscript this past year. I added a few new small presses to my pitch list, and of course picked up a few more books along the way. Among those, I found an amazing book called “Evidence of V” by Sheila O’Connor, from Rose Metal Press. Sheila O’Connor, drawing on the mystery surrounding her grandmother’s origin, tells the story of V, a talented fifteen-year-old singer in 1930s Minneapolis who aspires to be a star. The book explores the early twentieth century practice of incarcerating adolescent girls for “immorality.” O’Connor follows young V from her early work as a nightclub entertainer to her subsequent six-year state school sentence for an unplanned pregnancy.
Over the course of the conference, I attended sessions on speculative non-fiction, pitching best practices, writing about trauma and the unspeakable, how to choose the right publishing path for your book (something I am still trying to decide), and sessions on playing with time and building compelling scenes.
My only two regrets from the conference were not having the time to meet with Diane Wheaton, a fellow adoptee who lives near LA and who just released her memoir “Finding Loretta,” and being unable to attend Hannah Sward’s reading from her book, “The Strip.” While this amazing book is not adoption related, it calls to this adoptee’s heart due to its related themes of trauma, abandonment, addiction, identity and belonging.
BONUS BOOK: Another bonus book I fell in love with recently is “The English American” by Alison Larkin.
I hope you enjoy this year’s recommended Eggcellent books for your reading basket.
AWP Adoption Books and Adoptee Authors and More!
Famous Adopted People by Alice Stephens
Description:
Lisa Pearl is an American teaching English in Japan, and the situation there – thanks mostly to her spontaneous, hard-partying ways – has become problematic. Now she’s in Seoul, South Korea, with her childhood best-friend, Mindy. The young women share a special bond: They are both Korean-born adoptees into white American families. Mindy is in Seoul to track down her birth mom, and wants Lisa to do the same. Trouble is Lisa isn’t convinced she needs to know about her past, much less meet her biological mother.
She’d much rather spend time with Harrison, an almost supernaturally handsome local who works for the MotherFinder’s agency. When Lisa wakes up inside a palatial mountain compound, the captive of a glamorous, surgically enhanced blonde named Honey, she soon realizes she is going to learn about her past whether she likes it or not. What happens next only could in one place: North Korea.
About the Author:
Born in South Korea to a Korean mother and an American soldier father, this author became Alice Stephens when she was adopted at 9 months old into a white family from Philadelphia with three biological children.
When she was four, her family moved to Botswana.
Her work has appeared in Urban Mozaik, Flung Magazine, Banana Writers, The American, and the LA Review of Books, among other places. Famous Adopted People is her debut novel.
As a book reviewer, she strive to highlight marginalized voices, diverse authors, and books in translation. Additionally, she is a columnist for the Washington Independent Review of Books, a contributing editor to Bloom, a co-facilitator at Adoptee Voices Writing Group, co-founder of the Adoptee Literary Festival, and a member of The Starlings Collective.
An adoptee before she was a writer, her mission is to merge the two, and make great literature while changing the the narrative around adoption.
I Would Meet You Anywhere by Susan Ito
Description: Growing up with adoptive nisei parents, Susan Kiyo Ito knew only that her birth mother was Japanese American and her father White. But finding and meeting her birth mother in her early 20s was only the beginning of her search for answers, history, and identity. Though the two share a physical likeness, an affinity for ice cream, and a relationship that sometimes even feels familial, there is an ever-present tension between them, as a decades-long tug-of-war pits her birth mother’s desire for anonymity against Ito’s need to know her origins, to see and be seen. Along the way, Ito grapples with her own reproductive choices, the legacy of the Japanese American incarceration experience during World War II, and the true meaning of family. An account of love, what it’s like to feel neither here nor there, and one writer’s quest for the missing pieces that might make her feel whole, I Would Meet You Anywhere is the stirring culmination of Ito’s decision to embrace her right to know and tell her own story.
About the Author: Susan Kiyo Ito is the author of the memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere, published by the Ohio State University Press, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She co-edited the literary anthology A Ghost At Heart’s Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption. Her work has appeared in The Writer, Literary Mama, Catapult, Hyphen, The Bellevue Literary Review, Agni, Guernica, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, The Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook and Blue Mountain Center. Her theatrical adaption of Untold, stories of reproductive stigma, was produced at Brava Theater and her one-person show, The Ice Cream Gene, was performed throughout the US.
You Should Be Grateful by Angela Tucker
Description: 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 adopted involves layers of rejection, loss, and complexity that cannot be summed up so easily.
In “You Should Be Grateful,” Tucker centers the experiences of adoptees to share deeply personal stories, well-researched history, and engrossing anecdotes from mentorship sessions with adopted youth. These perspectives challenge the fairy-tale narrative of adoption, giving way to a fuller story that explores the impacts of racism, classism, family, love, and belonging..
About the Author: Angela Tucker is a Black woman adopted from foster care to a white family. Angela is the subject of Closure, a documentary that chronicles her search for her biological parents, she is the founder of The Adopted Life, a consulting company where she offers workshops and mentorship, with a mission to help center adoptee stories and bring clarity and truth narratives about race, class, and identity. She is the host of The Adoptee Next Door podcast and has advised the writers of Broadway’s Jagged Little Pill and NBC’s show, This Is Us. Angela lives in Seattle, Washington with her husband, Emmy-award winning filmmaker Bryan Tucker.
The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be: A Speculative Memoir of Transracial Adoption by Shannon Gibney
Description: 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 and the fictional story of Erin Powers, the name Shannon was given at birth by the white woman who gave her up for adoption.
At its core, the novel is a tale of two girls on two different timelines occasionally bridged by a mysterious portal and their shared search for a complete picture of their origins. Gibney surrounds that story with reproductions of her own adoption documents, letters, family photographs, interviews, medical records, and brief essays on the surreal absurdities of the adoptee experience. The end result is a remarkable portrait of an American experience rarely depicted in any form.
About the Author:
Shannon Gibney is a writer, educator, activist, and the author of See No Color (Carolrhoda Lab, 2015), a young adult novel based on her experience as a transracial adoptee that won the 2016 Minnesota Book Award in Young Peoples’ Literature. Her novel Dream Country (Dutton, September 2018), is the story of five generations of an African and African American family, trying to find freedom and home on two continents.
Gibney is faculty in English at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, where she teaches critical and creative writing, journalism, and African Diasporic topics. A Bush Artist and McKnight Writing Fellow, she is also at work on a children’s picture book, a literary anthology of writing by women of color on miscarriage and infant loss, and a family memoir.
Register the Missing by Ansley Moon (forthcoming)
Description: This forthcoming poetry collection from Kaya Press explores themes of displacement, identity, and the experience of being a transracial adoptee. Through verse, Moon examines what it means to be separated from one’s origins and the process of reconciling multiple identities.
About the Author: Ansley Moon is a poet, writer, and Korean adoptee. Her previous work includes the poetry collection “How to Bury the Dead.” Her writing explores themes of adoption, identity, and belonging. She has received fellowships from Kundiman and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.
Evidence of V by Sheila O’Connor
Description: In an ambitious blend of fact and fiction, including family secrets, documents from the era, and a thin, fragmentary case file unsealed by the court, novelist Sheila O’Connor tells the riveting story of V, a talented fifteen-year-old singer in 1930s Minneapolis who aspires to be a star. Drawing on the little-known American practice of incarcerating adolescent girls for “immorality” in the first half of the twentieth century, O’Connor follows young V from her early work as a nightclub entertainer to her subsequent six-year state school sentence for an unplanned pregnancy.
As V struggles to survive within a system only nominally committed to rescue and reform, she endures injustices that will change the course of her life and the lives of her descendants. Inspired by O’Connor’s research on her unknown maternal grandmother and the long-term effects of intergenerational trauma, Evidence of V: A Novel in Fragments, Facts, and Fictions is a poignant excavation of familial and national history that remains disturbingly relevant—a harrowing story of exploitation and erasure, and the infinite ways in which girls, past and present, are punished for crimes they didn’t commit. O’Connor’s collage novel offers an engaging balance between illuminating a shameful and hidden chapter of American history and captivating the reader with the vivid and unforgettable character of V.
About the Author: Sheila O’Connor is a multi-genre writer whose novels for adults include Evidence of V: A Novel in Fragments, Facts and Fictions, Where No Gods Came, and Tokens of Grace. Her novels for readers of all ages include Sparrow Road, Keeping Safe the Stars, and Until Tomorrow, Mr. Marsworth. Awards for her novels include the Michigan Prize for Literary Fiction, Minnesota Book Award, International Reading Award, and Midwest Booksellers Award. Her books have been included in Best Books of the Year by Booklist, VOYA, Book Page, Bank Street, Chicago Public Library, and Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers. She is a professor in the MFA program at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she also serves as Fiction Editor for Water~Stone Review.
sidework by Sasha Hom
Description: This novella tells the story of a homeless Korean American adoptee struggling to survive with her four children while working as a waitress. Hom examines themes of economic hardship, motherhood, and the complex intersection of adoption trauma with everyday survival.
About the Author: Sasha Hom is a writer and Korean adoptee whose work explores identity, belonging, and the long-term impacts of adoption. Published by Black Lawrence Press, her writing brings attention to perspectives often marginalized in both literary and adoption narratives.
Two weeks later, I brought “sidework” on a family fishing trip, and my 10-year-old homeschooled grandson would sit fishing off the dock listening to vignettes from Sasha’s book. “Read another,” he’d ask, casting his line back into the water. While not a kid’s book by a long shot, there is a curious wonder and tender humanity to Sasha’s storytelling that drew my grandson in, even when references to old rock stars or gentrification flew high above his head.
Finding Loretta by Diane Wheaton
Description: Adopted as an infant by a naval officer and his wife during the Baby Scoop Era, Diane Wheaton has always heard conflicting versions of the truth of her origins—but it’s not until she is forty-seven years old that she begins to search for her biological family in earnest. Amid search and reunion, however, Diane’s adoptive parents become ill—and while overseeing their care, she is told about a secret they have kept from her for over fifteen years. This shocking disclosure complicates her already complicated feelings for them, and she finds herself faced with an important decision—one that feels almost impossible to make, but which results in a level of healing she never could have anticipated.
A touching memoir of self-discovery, Finding Loretta is Diane’s tale of searching for history, roots, and family. Ultimately, she comes to accept the two distinct dynamics of the families who have helped make her who she is today, and in doing so she learns to embrace herself and feel grateful for everything she has experienced—even loss.
About the Author: Diane Wheaton is a writer and adoptee advocate based in the Los Angeles area. Her memoir “Finding Loretta” represents her literary debut, through which she contributes to greater understanding of adoptee experiences.
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The English American by Alison Larkin
Description: When Pippa Dunn,adopted as an infant and raised terribly British, discovers that her birth parents are from the American South, she finds that “culture clash” has layers of meaning she’d never imagined. Meet The English American, a fabulously funny, deeply poignant debut novel that sprang from Larkin’s autobiographical one-woman show of the same name.
Caught between two opposing cultures, two sets of parents, and two completely different men, Pippa is plunged into hilarious, heart-wrenching chaos. The birth father she adores turns out to be involved in neoconservative activities she hates; the mesmerizing mother who once abandoned her now refuses to let her go. And the man of her fantasies may be just that…
With an authentic adopted heroine at its center, Larkin’s compulsively readable first novel unearths universal truths about love, identity, and family with wit, warmth, and heart.
ALISON LARKIN is the bestselling author of “The English American,” a novel.
Springing from her hit one woman show, “The English American” is a compulsively readable autobiographical novel about an adopted English woman who finds her birth parents – and true love – in the United States.
A Vogue ‘most powerful book of the season’ and Redbook’s ‘Book Club pick of the month,’ “The English American” is currently under development for a film adaptation.
