Right now, I’ll use this page to catalogue my reading in adoption studies and critical adoption studies as I re-acquaint myself with the field and write a book. I’ll be revisiting classics (like Winnicott, Lifton, Grotevant, Pertman, Carp, Melosh) and reading new things as well. In each post, I’ll give the bibliography in 9th Edition MLA format for those of you for whom knowing that’s a thing. Then I’ll provide a short summary, longer for books. In the Thoughts section, I’ll write about what matters to me in this text, how I see it connect to the field of Critical Adoption Studies (in which I work), and where it makes me get those ugly lines between my eyebrows that if I were a person who cared about such things, I’d eradicate.
If you read and would like to engage, comments is the place to do that. Use comments to suggest other/more reading. I will remove comments that are hostile or self-seeking or trying to sell you stuff through bots especially. God I hate bots.
I don’t use AI for anything, thanks. Too old, too untrusting, uncertain of technology that tries to masticate existing things into other things without the capacity to innovate them (like wasps on a fence, and as stinging). So yeah. Not even the summaries, which you will discover are also idiosyncratic I think.
Probably, if you’re here, you know who I am. But if not, here’s my package bio.
Emily Hipchen is a Fulbright scholar, the editor of Adoption & Culture, co-editor of the book series Formations: Adoption, Kinship, and Culture (OSUP), and an emeritus editor of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies. She is also the author of a memoir, Coming Apart Together: Fragments from an Adoption (2005). She’s an editor of Inhabiting La Patria: Identity, Agency, and Antojo in the Works of Julia Alvarez (SUNY 2013) and of The Routledge Auto|Biography Studies Reader (2015). She has edited The Routledge Critical Adoption Studies Reader (2023) as well as six journal special issues. Her essays, short stories, and poems have won multiple awards and have appeared in Fourth Genre, Northwest Review, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She directs the Nonfiction Writing Program at Brown University, where she teaches nonfiction.
If you’d like to buy my books, here they are:
The memoir:
It’s only available through Amazon, I’m sorry. If you need a copy and can’t pay $30 (!!) email me and I’ll get you one for less. A lot less. Good gravy.
The edited volumes:
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