Adoption Resources is a curated reading and listening list on transracial adoption maintained by Tamil American essayist and adoptive mother Lakshmi Iyer, featuring her own essays alongside book-length work by adoptee and birth-parent voices she returns to.
The first book I read after our adoption paperwork went through was the wrong one. Optimistic, instructional, written by someone who had never waited for a phone call from a birth mother. I finished it in two sittings and felt less prepared than when I started. That was 2009. Our daughters arrived from Las Cruces in January 2010. The reading list I wish I had then did not exist in one place, so I started building it here.
I am an adoptive parent in an open transracial family, sixteen years in and still counting what I got wrong. I am not an adoptee or a birth parent, and I do not curate this as an expert. I curate it as someone who needed this list and could not find it.
Nothing here is neutral. I trust writing that complicates adoption more than writing that celebrates it, and accounts that stay in the ambiguity more than guides that promise it away. If you want reassurance, this is the wrong page. If you want to parent the child already in your house better than you did yesterday, keep reading.
Where I Would Start
If you are new to my writing, these are the essays I would hand you first. They are ordered roughly by when in the adoption journey they become relevant, though adoption does not move in a straight line and neither does the reading.
So, You Want To Adopt? What I tell the prospective adoptive parents who reach out each month, before they go any further.
Adoption: Do Not Adopt Unless You WANT To The companion piece. Wanting a child is the prerequisite, not the qualification. Where the line falls between the two.
Why Can’t We Talk About The Money? The financial silences inside adoption. Who pays, who profits, and why the money is the part nobody narrates.
Open Adoption Goes Both Ways On mutuality, boundaries, and the daily negotiation of a relationship with no template and no expiration date.
Open Adoption: Real Lives. Real Impacts. What openness looks like after the cameras leave and the social worker stops calling. The lived version, not the brochure.
Adoption: Complex, Nuanced, Heavy The piece I wrote when I stopped trying to make adoption sound simple for other people’s benefit.
Ten Years. Many Lessons. A decade marker. What I thought I knew at the start, set against what ten years actually taught.
On Gotcha Days And Marking Milestones The language of adoption milestones is broken. How do you name a day that is an arrival for you and a departure for someone else? The essay does not solve it. It refuses to pretend the day is simple.
Adoption Reunion: Pain And Pleasure What the search for the girls’ first family turned up, and what it asked of all of us afterward. A beginning, not an ending.
The Harder Questions
These essays came later, when the girls were older and the questions got sharper.
The Truth Shall Set You Free Why honesty about origins is a practice, not a one-time talk, and what it costs the parent to keep it up.
Subject to the Jurisdiction Thereof Citizenship, belonging, and the legal fictions adoption rests on. The Fourteenth Amendment and the amended birth certificate, read side by side.
Amy Coney Barrett: Emblematic Of All That Is Wrong With Adoption What it means when adoption becomes a public virtue for people who never had to face a relinquishing mother.
Motherhood, Cleaved On mothering inside a split that does not close. Their mother, and not their only mother.
Why I Share My Story The essay I point to when people ask why I write about my family at all, when my family did not sign up to be written.
Every November
Adoption Awareness Month brings a flood of gratitude posts and rescue narratives. I have written about NAAM most years, each time from a different angle, circling the same demand: that awareness account for what adoption costs, not only what it gives.
Brief Note On Adoption Awareness Month is the shortest version of this argument. NAAM: All About The Awareness goes deeper. #NAAM No One Size Fits All pushes against the idea that any single narrative can stand in for adoption. #NAM2018: What Can Adoptive Parents Do? is the most practical of the four.
For Children
Young children do not need theory. They need a book where a family like theirs, or a confusion like theirs, sits on the page without anyone explaining it.
I wrote Why Is My Hair Curly? for my daughters, who are white and were adopted by a Tamil American mother and an Indian father. It began as a bedtime question and became a book about looking nothing like the people who tuck you in, and being theirs anyway.
Voices I Return To
These are the writers whose work changed how I understand the seat I write from.
Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know. Chung is a Korean American adoptee raised by white parents in small-town Oregon. Her memoir about finding her birth family is the book I hand to adoptive parents who want to understand what their children might one day write about them. Restrained on the surface, devastating underneath.
Rhonda M. Roorda, In Their Voices trilogy. Roorda is a Black transracial adoptee adopted from the New York foster care system into a white Dutch American family. Her trilogy, In Their Own Voices, In Their Parents’ Voices, and In Their Siblings’ Voices, does what most adoption literature does not: it lets every member of the triad speak, in sequence, without editing one perspective to comfort another. Her memoir Torn from the Root is forthcoming from Temple University Press in July 2026.
Lori Holden, The Open-Hearted Way to Open Adoption. Co-written by an adoptive mother and her daughter’s birth mother. The most practical book I know on building and maintaining an open adoption relationship. Holden also runs the blog Lavender Luz, a steady companion for years.
Gretchen Sisson, Relinquished. Sisson is a sociologist at UCSF’s ANSIRH program. The first major book to treat birth mothers’ accounts as data, not anecdote. If you have only ever read relinquishment from the adoptive side, begin here.
Podcasts
Born In June Raised In April by April Dinwoodie. Dinwoodie is a transracial adoptee, former CEO of the Donaldson Adoption Institute, and one of the clearest voices in adoption advocacy. Her podcast title comes from the distance between the name her birth mother gave her and the name her adoptive parents chose. The interviews are unhurried and honest. Start anywhere.
Going Deeper
For the full arc of my adoption writing, see the Transracial Adoption Parenting hub. The Smudged Hyphen collects many of these essays in print, next to the immigration and identity pieces.
I keep this page open because the list is never finished. The essays I wrote in 2018 already read differently to me than they did then, and the ones I am writing now will not hold still either. The subject keeps moving. So do I.
If something here changed how you parent, or if you are at the beginning and lost, write to me. I will tell you what I know and where I am still guessing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start reading about transracial adoption?
Begin with the essays grouped above under Where I Would Start. They move roughly through the adoption journey, from the decision to adopt through the years that follow. If you prefer book-length treatment, Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know and Rhonda M. Roorda’s In Their Own Voices are the two adoptee-perspective works to read first.
What books should adoptive parents read about transracial adoption?
The Voices I Return To section above lists the four book-length works Lakshmi Iyer has come back to most: Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know, Rhonda M. Roorda’s In Their Voices trilogy, Lori Holden’s The Open-Hearted Way to Open Adoption, and Gretchen Sisson’s Relinquished. For a longer curated list, see the Books About Transracial Adoption page.
What podcast covers transracial adoption from an adoptee perspective?
April Dinwoodie’s Born In June Raised In April is the one to start with. Dinwoodie is a transracial adoptee and former CEO of the Donaldson Adoption Institute; the interviews are unhurried and honest. The title comes from the gap between the name her birth mother gave her and the name her adoptive parents chose.
Who writes about transracial adoption from the adoptive parent’s side?
Lakshmi Iyer is a Tamil American adoptive mother whose essays examine transracial adoption from the adoptive parent’s perspective. The essays linked above are the work she would hand to other adoptive parents first. The full body of work is gathered on the Transracial Adoption Parenting hub.