“Good god, this book. A thunderclap of emotion. I am rearranged. Osmundson's best work of nonfiction yet.” —Lulu MillerAbout this Event
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.
Joseph Osmundson is a professor of microbiology at New York University and the author of the National Book Critics Circle and Lambda Literary award finalist, Virology. 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.
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.
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.
Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Masks are strongly encouraged for this event. We have one industrial air purifier, two smaller air purifiers, and four ceiling fans throughout our space. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. To request ASL interpretation for this event, please email [email protected] by no later than 14 days before the event. For other access needs please email .
Event Venue
Women & Children First, 5233 North Clark Street, Chicago, United States
USD 0.00
