Joseph Osmundson: Spawning Season

Join us for a release event with biophysicist and writer Joseph Osmundson, discussing his new book SPAWNING SEASON.

Join us for a release event with biophysicist and writer Joseph Osmundson, discussing his new book Spawning Season. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd-floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

Can’t make the event? Purchase a signed copy of Spawning Season here.

ACCESSIBILITY:

Strand Book Store is an ADA-compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator.

ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at events@strandbooks.com by May 15 to request.

Please ask a Strand employee upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred.

For further information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact events@strandbooks.com

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NBCC and Lambda Literary Award finalist Joseph Osmundson chronicles his journey toward and away from parenthood to ask how we create and nurture 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 falling 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 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.

Photo Credit: Ted Ely

Joseph Osmundson is a professor of microbiology at New York University and the author of Virology, which was a National Book Critics Circle and Lambda Literary Award finalist. 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.