About this Event
About the Event:
Join us Wednesday, July 8 at 6 PM to hear biologist & author Joseph Osmundson discuss his intimate new memoir, Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood.
Philly-based author Joseph Earl Thomas and writer & translator Carina del Valle Schorske will join Osmundson in conversation. A Q&A and book signing will follow their discussion. Copies of Spawning Season will be available for purchase at the event.
Registration is pay-what-you-want and highly recommended. (Registration helps us plan the arrangement of our space and know how many books to order!)
Questions? Email [email protected], and follow @theheadandthehand on Instagram for events, book clubs, updates, and more.
About 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.
Essayist Kiese Laymon says Spawning Season “is delicate, probing, surprisingly fun, and geniusly patient when I most needed to believe books could save parts of us. Parenting stories do not look, end or begin as we believe, and Osmundson will have you stomping for joy at acceptance of our shared paradox.”
About the Authors:
Joseph Osmundson is a professor of microbiology at New York University and the author of Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between, which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. His work has been published in leading biological journals including Cell and PNAS and in the New York Times, the Atlantic, TIME, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives and works in New York City.
Joseph Earl Thomas is the author of the memoir Sink, a finalist for the William Saroyan International Writing Prize; the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, winner of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize; and the forthcoming story collection Leviathan Beach (Penguin Random House, 2027). His prose and poetry has been published in The Paris Review, The Verge, VQR, Harper’s, N+1, Vanity Fair, and elsewhere. His honors include the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize, The Anisfield-Wolf Fellowship in Writing and Publishing, and fellowships from The Miami Bookfair, Fulbright, and The Hermitage. He teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and Literature courses at The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
Carina del Valle Schorske is a freelance essayist, translator, and Contributing Writer at New York Times Magazine. Her essays have been honored with a National Magazine Award, an Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant, and the Robert Silvers Prize. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Columbia, and her first book, The Other Island, is forthcoming from Riverhead.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Head & The Hand Books, 2230 Frankford Avenue, Philadelphia, United States
USD 0.00 to USD 17.85
