Stranger in My Own Story | Author Erik Mohn with Tony Hynes

Join Skinner House Books for an event with author Erik Mohn to discuss and celebrate the release of his debut memoir Stranger in My Own Story. He will be in conversation with writer and speaker Tony Hynes.

A raw and searching debut that chronicles coming of age as a transracial adoptee. A necessary addition to the modern canon of literary memoirs that explore race, identity, and belonging.

Erik Mohn was raised to believe that love was enough. America taught him otherwise. Born to a Black mother he never knew and adopted by a white family in small-town Massachusetts, Mohn grew up cherished yet unprepared for what his skin would mean in the world.

Stranger in My Own Story traces Mohn’s coming of age as he searches not just for identity but for language—words for grief, for anger, for belonging, for the silence left by a mother he lost and a father he could never quite reach. He pieces together meaning from what’s available and hip-hop becomes his first mirror and his first vocabulary—a survival guide passed through speakers and headphones.

As the cost of his cultural displacement begins to surface, Mohn is forced to confront the wounds he’s been carrying. Those reckonings come to a head at Howard University—where the self he assembled in isolation is tested in community, challenged in relationship, and slowly transformed.

Written with the lyrical pulse of hip-hop and a moral clarity forged in lived experience, Stranger in My Own Story is an intimate memoir of transracial adoption and a universal story about what it costs to grow up without a mirror—and what it takes to build one anyway. Mohn's story is a reflection of the nation's: unfinished, fragile, and still reaching toward wholeness.

Erik Mohn is a writer and speaker whose work explores identity, belonging, and the stories we inherit and carry. His debut memoir, Stranger in My Own Story, chronicles his journey through transracial adoption, examining how race, culture, and masculinity shape the search for home and inviting readers to reclaim their stories with vulnerability and pride. He divides his time between Charlotte, North Carolina, and Brooklyn, New York.

Moderator Tony Hynes, Ph.D. was adopted by his parents, Mary and Janet, in the mid-1990s. He writes about his experiences growing up as both an interracial adoptee and as a child growing up in an LGBTQ-headed household in his memoir The Son With Two Moms, which has been cited in the DC family court system to inform best practice. His work and writing have been featured in The Atlantic and he is a contributing author to books such as Adoption Unfiltered.

He has been invited to be a speaker at conferences on adoption and foster care throughout the nation and has a passion for speaking up for children and families touched by challenges in the adoption and foster care system. As the Training and Content Development Specialist at C.A.S.E., he has designed innovative training curricula that help families and professionals respond to evaluation and assessment tools that encapsulate holistic pictures of adoptees and foster youth.