Joseph Osmundson

Join us on Wednes day, June 17 at 7 PM as Joseph Osmundson talks about his new book,

Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood.

He will be joined in conversation by Andrea Lawlor and Jendi Reiter.

About the Book

NBCC and Lambda Literary Award finalist Joseph Osmundson chronicles his journey toward and away from parenthood to ask how we create and n urture 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 f alling 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 expl oratory prose that builds on the work of Donna Haraway and José Esteban Mu ñoz, 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.

About the A uthor

Joseph Osmundson

is a professor of microbiology at New York University and the a uthor of

Virology. His work has been published in leading biologi cal 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.

About Andrea Lawlor

Andrea Lawlor is th e author of a novel,

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

(Vintage), as well as two chapbooks,

Position Papers

Vol.1 (Factory Hollow) &

Position Papers

Vol.2 (Belladonna*). They teach creative writing at Mount Holyoke College.

Ab out Jendi Reiter

Jendi Reiter is the author of nine books, including the forthcoming poetry collection Introvert Pervert (The Word Works, 2026) and the novels Two Natures and Origin Story, both from Saddle Road Press. Their work explores themes of belonging and becoming, magic, queerness, and family violence. They have degrees from Harvard, Columbia, and the Temple of Witchcraft Mystery School. Raised on the Lower East Side of NYC, they now live in Western Massachusetts with their family.

Register

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