About this Event
Moderating this discussion are notable writers Whitney Richards Calathes and Denne Michele Norris. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd-floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.
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ACCESSIBILITY:
Strand Book Store is an ADA-compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator.
ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at [email protected] by May 15 to request.
Please ask a Strand employee upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred.
For further information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact [email protected]
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NBCC and Lambda Literary Award finalist Joseph Osmundson chronicles his journey toward and away from parenthood to ask how we create and nurture queer families.
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 couple he had known since college, two women, 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 mothers 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.
Photo Credit: Ted Ely
Joseph Osmundson is a professor of microbiology at New York University and the author of Virology, which was a National Book Critics Circle and Lambda Literary Award finalist. His work has been published in leading biological journals, including Cell and PNAS, and in the New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives and works in New York City.
Whitney Richards Calathes (she/her) is a writer, teacher, and mother from the Bronx. Her academic work is focused on the geographies Black women make across generations in the face of punishment systems, and this exploration has led her to work in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, Nepal and Jordan. She is currently now in Kingston, Jamaica, lecturing at the University of the West Indies with the Institute for Gender and Development Studies.
Denne Michele Norris is the editor-in-chief of Electric Literature, winner of the 2022 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. She is the first Black, openly trans woman to helm a major literary publication. A 2021 Out100 Honoree, her writing has been supported by MacDowell, Tin House, and Kimbilio Center for Black Fiction, and appears in McSweeney's, American Short Fiction, and ZORA. She is co-host of the critically-acclaimed podcast Food 4 Thot, and her debut novel, When The Harvest Comes, was released by Random House in April 2025.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Strand Book Store, 828 Broadway, New York, United States
USD 13.61 to USD 34.50
