Subscribe to our newsletter
Joseph Osmundson is a professor of microbiology at New York University and the author of Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between. His work has been published in leading biological journals including Cell and PNAS and in the New York Times, The Atlantic, TIME Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives and works in New York City. More about this author >
Filed in the following archives
From the publisher:
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 lesbian couple he had known since college 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 partners 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.
