I’m Lakshmi G. Iyer, a Tamil American essayist. I write about open transracial adoption from a side the shelf usually skips: the Indian American adoptive parent. I’m a brown mother raising white children, in contact with both birth families since 2010, and most of what I write begins in that gap between how a family looks and what it carries.
Where to Begin
- Transracial Adoption & Parenting: sixteen years of raising children across color lines, from the adoptive parent’s side.
- Indian American Adoptive Parent: the brown mother’s side of transracial adoption, a lane almost no one writes from.
- Indian American Identity: Tamil American life in the diaspora, and the work of living inside the hyphen.
- All Essays: the full archive, by thread.
Books
- The Smudged Hyphen (2026). Essay collection on transracial adoption, Tamil American identity, and belonging.
- A Star Keeps Its Distance (2026). Novel following a K-pop music journalist.
- Hindsight (2024). Novel, set between Coimbatore and Pennsylvania.
- Why Is My Hair Curly? (2020). Middle-grade chapter book about identity and family.
Recent Essays
- Openness as a Practice: On WGBB’s After the Kids Move In (2026 Transcript)
A June 2026 radio conversation with AFFCNY’s Pat O’Brien and Chester Jackson: infertility grief, open adoption, and learning to hold children lightly.
- The Color Sanguine
This week I have been hard at work plumbing the depths. I sifted through years of correspondence, pored over pictures, marinated in memories from over… Read more: The Color Sanguine
- The Long Count
Nithya Raman is closing the gap one counted ballot at a time. On the slow, invisible labor of the women still waiting to be seen, and the work that outlasts the wait.
New here? Start here. More about me on the About page. To reach me, use the Contact page.