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Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood by Joseph Osmundson
Featured Book
Spawning Season
From the author of National Book Critics Circle Award and Lambda Literary Award finalist VIROLOGY comes an intimate chronicle of queer family-making. Since grade school, Joseph Osmundson dreamed of being pregnant. As he grew into the queer scientist he is today, the economic precarity of academia and the warming planet led to his decision not to reproduce. That is, until a lesbian couple he had known since college came to him with a proposition: would Joe be a bio-dad and would he co-parent alongside them? Soon everything was falling into place. But when the two partners communicated their need for a child to reflect their own racial backgrounds, Joe's whiteness exposed fault lines in their parenting journey. Spawning Season is a genre-bending memoir that treats the scientific as integral to the personal and that builds an entire species of the grief we carry in our bodies. In exploratory prose that builds on the work of Donna Haraway and José Esteban Muñoz, Osmundson considers the ethics of child-rearing in the 21st century, the brutal wonder of caregiving, and the joys and intricacies of building family beyond biology.
This book will be available for purchase at the event.
About This Event
Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood by Joseph Osmundson
From the author of National Book Critics Circle Award and Lambda Literary Award finalist VIROLOGY comes an intimate chronicle of queer family-making.
Featured Author
Joseph Osmundson
Joseph S. Osmundson is an American biophysicist and writer. He is a Clinical Associate Professor of Biology at New York University. Osmundson is the author of various books exploring bodies, queerness, race, and geography
Presenters
Marisa Siegel
Marisa Siegel (she/her) holds an MFA from Mills College in Oakland, CA. Her debut poetry chapbook, Fixed Stars, was published in 2022 by Burrow Press and her essay “Inherited Anger” appears in the acclaimed anthology Burn It Down (Seal Press, 2019). Find her online at marisasiegel.com.
C. Russell Price
C. Russell Price is the author of Tonight, We Fuck the Trailer Park Out of Each Other; oh, you thought this was a date?!: Apocalypse Poems, and the forthcoming collection Bisquick: An American Seance (out August this year with Northwestern University Prese). They are a poet in residence at the Chicago Poetry Center, a member of the editorial collective of The Anarchist Review of Books, and a curatorial board member for the Ragdale Foundation. They landscape in Chicago.
About the Venue
Women & Children First
Women & Children First believes in the transformative power of literature. As intersectional trans-inclusive feminists, we believe books are tools for liberation. Since 1979, we have celebrated and amplified underrepresented voices.
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