Torn from the Root
A Memoir of a Black Transracial Adoptee
Rhonda M. Roorda
As a Black child adopted and raised by white Evangelical parents, Rhonda Roorda had to learn how to walk in two different worlds. She often questioned "whether my skin was too dark" and if she "acted too white." She recalls being haunted by feelings of shame and not "being enough." Torn from the Root is her illuminating story of identity, belonging, and purpose, and lays bare the deep pain she felt navigating life as a vulnerable Black girl and how she healed herself.
31 July 2026 250pp 8 halftones
9781439927939 £23.99 HB
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Twice Blessed A Story of Unconditional Love
Stefanie Mercado Altman, Stan Altman & Claire Altman
Twice Blessed is a beautifully written memoir that explores the depths of love, resilience, and the true meaning of family. Stefanie Mercado Altman, Claire Altman, and Stan Altman share an intimate and inspiring story about the bonds that define us, from adoption to caregiving and beyond. When Stefanie was adopted by Claire and Stan, their family was built on love and trust rather than biology.
07 October 2025 304pp 35 b&w illus.
9781531511807 £23.99 HB
FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS
Adoption Memoirs Inside Stories
Marianne Novy
Adoption Memoirs tells inside stories of adoption that popular media miss. Marianne Novy shows how adoption memoirs and films recount not only happy moments, but also the lasting pain of relinquishing a child, the racism and trauma that adoptees such as Jackie Kay and Jane Jeong Trenka experienced, and the unexpected complexities of child-rearing adoptive parents Emily Prager and Jesse Green encountered. Novy considers 45 memoirs, mostly from the 21st century, by birthmothers, adoptees, and adoptive parents, about same-race and transracial adoption.
28 June 2024 262pp
9781439925904 £24.99 PB
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Who Is a Worthy Mother?
An Intimate History of Adoption
Rebecca Wellington
Adoption practices are woven into the fabric of American society and reflect how our nation values human beings, particularly mothers. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption. As a mother, historian, and adoptee, Rebecca C. Wellington is uniquely qualified to uncover the policies and practices of adoption. Wellington’s timely—and deeply researched—account amplifies previously marginalized voices and exposes the social and racial biases embedded in the United States’ adoption industry.
09 April 2024 232pp
9780806193700 £19.99 HB
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Out of Place
The Lives of Korean Adoptee Immigrants
SunAh M Laybourn Korean adoptees routinely experience refusals of belonging, whether by state agents, laws, and regulations, in everyday interactions, or even through media portrayals that render them invisible. Laybourn, herself a Korean American adoptee, examines this long-term journey, with a particular focus on the race-making process and the contradictions inherent to the model minority myth.
16 January 2024 240pp
9781479814787 £22.99 PB
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
In Reunion
Transnational
Korean Adoptees and the Communication of Family
Sara Docan-Morgan
Drawing from qualitative interviews with adult Korean adoptees in the United States and Denmark, as well as her own experiences as an adoptee, Docan-Morgan illuminates the complexities of communication surrounding reunion. She also offers practical recommendations for transnational adoptees in reunion, adoptees considering reunion, adoptive families, and adoption practitioners.
05 January 2024 321pp
9781439922835 £31.00 PB
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Conceiving Christian America
Embryo Adoption and Reproductive Politics
Risa Cromer
Cromer uncovers how embryo adoption advances ambitious political goals for expanding the influence of conservative Christian values and power.
Conceiving Christian America is the first book on embryo adoption tracing how this powerful social movement draws on white saviorist tropes in their aims to reconceive personhood, with drastic consequences for reproductive rights and justice.
05 September 2023 320pp 7 b&w figures
9781479818594 £23.99 PB
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
A Generation Removed
The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World
Margaret D. Jacobs In A Generation Removed, a powerful blend of history and family stories, awardwinning historian Margaret D. Jacobs examines how government authorities in the post–World War II era removed thousands of American Indian children from their families and placed them in non-Indian foster or adoptive families. By the late 1960s an estimated 25 to 35 percent of Indian children had been separated from their families.
01 August 2023 402pp 14 photos, 1 illus., 1 table 9781496235435 £26.99 PB
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Cleave
Holly Pelesky
Cleave is a tight collection of epistolary creative nonfiction that examines the ambiguous grief of being a birth mother caught in the momentum of adulthood and the constant choices that come along with it. In these letters to the daughter she didn't keep, Pelesky attempts to make peace with the decisions she's made as a mother and those she's made as someone's child. Full of hard realizations and tender moments, this book will break and mend your heart.
23 August 2022 116pp
9781957392097 £11.99 PB
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
Do Right by Me Learning to Raise Black Children in White Spaces
Valerie I. Harrison & Kathryn Peach
D'Angelo
For decades, D’Angelo and Harrison engaged in conversations about race and racism. However, when Katie and her husband, who are white, adopted Gabriel, a biracial child, Katie’s conversations with Val, who is black, were no longer theoretical and academic. The stakes grew from the two friends trying to understand each other’s perspectives to a mother navigating, with input from her friend, how to equip a child with the tools that will best serve him as he grows up in a white family.
27 November 2020 194pp 36 colour photos 9781439919958 £14.99 PB TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Creole Son An Adoptive Mother Untangles Nature and Nurture
E. Kay Trimberger
Creole Son is the compelling memoir of a single white mother searching to understand why her adopted biracial son grew from a happy child into a troubled young adult who struggled with addiction for decades. The answers, E. Kay Trimberger finds, lie in both nature and nurture. When five-day-old Marco is flown from Louisiana to California and placed in Trimberger's arms, she assumes her values and example will be the determining influences upon her new son's life. 26 six years later, when she helps him make contact with his Cajun and Creole biological relatives, she discovers that many of his cognitive and psychological strengths and difficulties mirror theirs.
01 April 2020 212pp 6 halftones 9780807173107 £22.99 PB LSU PRESS
A War Born Family
African American Adoption in the Wake of the Korean War
Kori A. Graves
The origins of a transnational adoption strategy that secured the future for Korean-black children The Korean War left hundreds of thousands of children in dire circumstances, but the first large-scale transnational adoption efforts involved the children of American soldiers and Korean women. Korean laws and traditions stipulated that citizenship and status passed from father to child, which made the children of US soldiers legally stateless. Koreanblack children faced additional hardships
because of Korean beliefs about racial purity, and the segregation that structured African American soldiers' lives in the military and throughout US society.
28 January 2020 328pp
9781479872329 £39.00 HB
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
Steeped in Blood Adoption, Identity, and the Meaning of Family
Frances J. Latchford
What personal truths reside in biological ties that are absent in adoptive ties? And why do we think adoptive and biological ties are essentially different when it comes to understanding who we are? At a time when interest in DNA and ancestry is exploding, Latchford questions the idea that knowing one's bio-genealogy is integral to personal identity or a sense of family and belonging. .
15 August 2019 416pp
9780773556812 £35.00 PB
MCGILL-QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY PRESS
The End of International Adoption? An Unraveling Reproductive Market and the Politics of Healthy Babies
Estye Fenton
Since 2004, the number of international adoptions in the US has declined by more than seventy percent. In The End of International Adoption? Fenton studies parents in the US who adopted internationally in the past decade during this shift. She investigates the experiences of a cohort of adoptive mothers who were forced to negotiate their desire to be parents in the context of a growing societal awareness of international adoption as a flawed reproductive marketplace.
28 June 2019 182pp
9780813599687 £26.99 PB
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Disrupting Kinship
Transnational Politics of Korean Adoption in the United States
Kimberly D. McKee
Since the Korean War began, Western families have adopted more than 200,000 Korean children. Two-thirds of these adoptees found homes in the United States. The majority joined white families and in the process forged a new kind of transnational and transracial kinship. McKee examines the growth of the neocolonial, multi-million-dollar global industry that shaped these families-a system she identifies as the transnational adoption industrial complex.
02 March 2019 250pp 5 b&w photos
9780252084058 £19.99 PB
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Legitimating Life
Adoption in the Age of Globalization and Biotechnology
Sonja van Wichelen
The phenomenon of transnational adoption is changing in the age of globalization and biotechnology. In Legitimating Life, Sonja van Wichelen boldly describes how contemporary justifications of cross-border adoption navigate between child welfare, humanitarianism, family making, capitalism, science, and health. Focusing on contemporary institutional practices of adoption in the United States and the Netherlands, she traces how professionals, bureaucrats, lawyers, politicians, social workers, and experts legitimate a practice that became progressively controversial.
14 November 2018 224pp 5 b&w 9781978800519 £32.00 PB
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Selling Transracial Adoption
Families, Markets, and the Color Line
Elizabeth Raleigh
While focused on serving children and families, the adoption industry must also generate sufficient revenue to cover an agency’s operating costs. With its fee-for-service model, Elizabeth Raleigh asks, How does private adoption operate as a marketplace? Her eyeopening book, Selling Transracial Adoption, provides a fine-grained analysis of the business decisions in the adoption industry and what it teaches us about notions of kinship and race.
15 December 2017 274pp
9781439914786 £26.99 PB
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Reframing Transracial Adoption
Adopted Koreans, White Parents, and the Politics of Kinship
Kristi Brian
Brian A provocative critique of transnational, transracial adoption from a critical race and feminist perspective and a vision for reform Until the late 20th century, the majority of foreign-born children adopted in the United States came from Korea. In the absorbing book Reframing Transracial Adoption, Kristi Brian investigates the power dynamics at work between the white families, the Korean adoptees, and the unknown birth mothers.
11 May 2012 230pp
9781439901847 £23.99 PB
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS
