2024 Gave Us 15 Powerful Adoption Books: The Hits and Hidden Gems”
As we reflect on 2024’s remarkable contributions to adoption literature, I’m struck by the depth, courage, and compassion these authors bring to our community’s ongoing conversation. From in-depth research to intimate memoirs, these works illuminate different facets of the adoption experience. While some titles on this list have already garnered significant attention, I’ve included others may have slid under your radar. I wish I could say I have read them all, but I can’t. Those I have yet to read will be sliding into 2025 with me.
Six New Adoption Books for Eggcellent Spring Reading
Is it just me or does 2024 seem to be showing itself as the year of adoption books? Weekly, I find myself adding a new adoption book to my cart. Adoptee, adoptive parent, and first mother memoirs, collective constellation anthologies, and research-based critical analysis written by experts outside our community, all striving to beat back the long-established win-win adoption narrative, which has long deluded society.
A Dozen Shareable Doozies: 12 Gretchen Sisson Quotes on Adoption
12 GRETCHEN SISSON QUOTES ON ADOPTION Just before the release of Gretchen Sisson’s RELINQUISHED: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood, an ARC of the book landed on my doorstep. I couldn’t wait to dive in, but a 10-hour car trip convinced me to buy it on Audible rather than wait to read […]
Summer Reading: The Adoption Memoirs Inside this Adoptee’s Beach Bag
“Where better to read an adoption memoir than on the beach in front of my childhood home,” I thought, stuffing more books than I knew I’d be able to make time for into my suitcase. A bottle of 70 SPF sunscreen, floppy hat, towel, and swim suit, lay all helter-skelter atop, The Gathering Place by Emma Stevens, Goodbye Again by Candace Cahill, and Parallel Universe by David B. Bohl. I’d met all three authors a few months earlier at the Untangling Our Roots conference, in Louisville, Kentucky.
Eight Books That Healed This Adoptee’s Heart
Eight Books That Healed This Adoptee’s Heart Healing, and the individual journey we each take on our unique paths, has been on my mind lately. The National Association of Adoptees and Parents recently invited me to speak at their Fall mini-retreat “Journeying Together Toward Healing.” Across two sessions, I will share my personal story and […]
A Mother’s Day Book Review: GOD AND JETFIRE, by Amy Seek
A BOOK REVIEW HONORING AMY SEEK & ALL BIRTHMOTHERS “I had the impulse to say ‘Happy Mother’s Day’ but my imagination cycled through potential worst-case scenarios… Our motherhoods were like optical illusions where you are going up stairs and down stairs—but it’s impossible for your brain to comprehend both at once. Would this day be […]
Claiming Your Voice Podcast Interview
Sharing My Adoption Journey with Janeice Garrard It was so exciting to do my first podcast interview as a guest on the Claiming Your Voice podcast. Janeice was so kind, set me at ease, and held a safe, supportive place for me to share my story. I talked with her about how I came to […]
Paying It Forward: My Dream to Offer an Adoption Writing Residency in the Vintage Trailer Where I was Conceived
Having Been Gifted the Space to Start My Adoptee Memoir; I Plan to Pay it Forward by Creating an Adoption Writing Residency in the Texas Hill Country The idea for an adoption writing residency came to me after reflecting on the support and assistance I was given to help my dream of writing my memoir […]
GUEST POST: Why Is That Controversial? Adoptees have a stake in the fight to protect abortion rights.
Tony Corsetino offers an adoptee’s perspective on abortion right, a hot topic among adoptees: “There is an enormous moral difference, however, between relinquishment and adoption as intervening in a crisis situation for which there is no better alternative, versus instituting a de facto social system in which people are coerced into producing children for transferral into other, unrelated families.”
