Biography Adoption

Winner of the 2023 Sarton Award for Nonfiction Merging real stories with research and on-the-ground reporting, an award-winning journalist and immigrant explores multicultural parenting and identity in the US Through her own stories and interviews with other immigrant families, award-winning...

“This powerful and meticulously argued book reveals that immigration crackdowns … [have] always been about saving and protecting the racist idea of a white America.” —Ibram X. Kendi, award-winning author of Four Hundred Souls and Stamped from the Beginning “A damning inquiry into the...

An important, hopeful book that looks at the urgent problem of childhood malnutrition worldwide and the revolutionary progress being made to end it. A healthy Earth requires healthy children. Yet nearly one-fourth of the world’s children are stunted physically and mentally due to a lack of...

Shehnaz was a beautiful, erudite woman from the royal family of Bhopal, who was almost cast to play Anarkali in K. Asif's Mughal-e-Azam. Her daughter Sophia Naz tells her story as she heard it from her-about her childhood as part of the royal household in Bhopal, where she led a revolt among the...

Revised and updated with a new introduction by the author—and available in English for the first time—the moving story of a man who always wanted to be a father and the long emotional road to making his dream come true. Born in Cuba and raised in the USA, Armando Lucas Correa epitomized the...

I was four months old when I was adopted, taken from an orphanage and placed into what was supposed to be a loving family. But love had conditions. Survival had rules. And silence was the price of staying. By sixteen, I had already learned how to disappear—into alcohol, into drugs, into the arms of men who didn’t care if I made it out alive. By eighteen, I was a mother, barely keeping my head above water, raising a child while still a child myself. When I got pregnant again at twenty-one, I knew one thing for sure: I wasn’t going to drag another innocent life into my chaos.

Jack Rocco was a baby when he was adopted by a blue-collar, Italian American family. Today a successful orthopedic surgeon, Jack’s identity was built around his Italian heritage, and while he knew the story of his “Gotday,” he didn’t know the story of his birth day. His was a closed adoption, and he only knew that his birth parents were a young couple—an Italian father and a German Irish mother—who couldn’t afford a child.

A searching, eloquent memoir about the joys and hardships of open adoption. God and Jetfire is a mother's account of her decision to surrender her son in an open adoption and of their relationship over the twelve years that follow. Facing an unplanned pregnancy at twenty-two, Amy Seek and her ex-boyfriend begin an exhaustive search for a family to raise their child. They sift through hundreds of "Dear Birth Mother" letters, craft an extensive questionnaire, and interview numerous potential couples.

Includes an audiobook-exclusive song by Todd Tilghman, “Sandcastles.” Read by the author. Learn to celebrate the smallest victories and unlock some of life's greatest joys! What does a forty-two-year-old, small-town pastor do when he wins one of the most popular singing competitions in the...

No matter how broken our past or great our misfortunes, we can create a new beginning and build a life of love and kindness. Taken from his mother at age three, Steve Klakowicz lives in the clutches of a cruel foster family. He finds his only refuge in a box of books given to him by a kind...

Everyone loves coming-home stories, especially when they include dogs and happy endings! From Steven Carino and Alex Tresniowski comes Oliver for Young Readers, a heartwarming and true story of a man searching for a beloved lost dog and finding more than he’d ever hoped for. When Steven Carino...

For all women looking to find “hope in a hopeless world and bravery in an age that seems to lack it,” comes a searing memoir by Shannon Dingle, a writer and disability advocate who has navigated loss, trauma, abuse, spiritual reawakening, and deep pain—and come out the other side still...

Disruptors, entrepreneurs, and unconventional do-gooders, Drs. Jodi and Garry Vermaas are not the people you would expect to parent 12 children. From the child-trafficking slums of Manila to the barren corners of China to the baggage compartment of a long-distance train to Mumbai, each of their children has a tale to tell - if only they could find the words.

House on Fire, a raw and riveting memoir by author and publisher Jenn T. Grace, explores her journey growing up as an adopted child in a chaotic household. Surviving a turbulent childhood marked by family conflict, mental illness, and alcoholism, Grace promises herself that life will get better. But as an adult, Grace’s personal and professional successes belie her inner turmoil.

From her childhood in China to the moment she won her first National Book Award, literary icon Katherine Paterson shares the personal stories that inspired her children's books. Told with her trademark humor and heart, Paterson's tales reveal details about her life from her childhood with missionary parents, to living as a single woman in Japan, to raising four children in suburban Maryland with her minister husband.

Everybody knows what adoption is, but adoption has changed dramatically over recent decades. Open adoptions create an opportunity for biological parents to remain connected with the child even after the adoption takes place. Emotionally, this is still largely uncharted territory for everybody involved and relationships can be difficult to navigate. Told from the point of view of an adoptive father, the journey the Elkins took is such a roller coaster ride you would think this true story was fiction.

In Bitterroot Susan Devan Harness traces her journey to understand the complexities and struggles of being an American Indian child adopted by a white couple and living in the rural American West. When Harness was fifteen years old, she questioned her adoptive father about her “real” parents. He replied that they had died in a car accident not long after she was born—except they hadn’t, as Harness would learn in a conversation with a social worker a few years later.

Michael Reagan's life is much more than just an interesting story. It is a testimony of how Christ allowed him to find healing from many of the issues that confront our culture today, such as sexual abuse, divorce, loneliness, the feeling of rejection, and the belief that God does not care about us. Michael Reagan's first adoption gave him an identity, but he did not find his true identity until he found Christ.

How does a mother cope when she is forced to walk away from her three children and never see them again? That is what happened to JB's mother, Myrtle. Eventually, rescued from her despair by tall, dark, and handsome George Rowley, who fell in love with her, Myrtle started a new life and had seven more children. She buried the grief of losing her first children deep within and kept her pain secret. JB and her siblings were unaware of the existence of Myrtle's first three children until after she died.

Melissa Ohden is 14 when she learns she is the survivor of a botched abortion. In this intimate memoir, she details for the first time her search for her biological parents, and her own journey from anger and shame to faith and empowerment.