Adoption Scholar, Author, & Adoptee Rights Advocate

About Me

I'm a domestic transracial adoptee from Texas who was adopted at birth through the Methodist Mission Home (now Providence Place) in San Antonio. Born in 1991, my adoption was a semi-open adoption (which is another way of saying, all communication went through the agency and no identifying information allowed, no last names, monitored contact). I grew up in the Panhandle of Texas which I think gives you enough context for pretty much ... everything else.

I became a diary writer and a poet as a teen because if there’s anything I inherently knew how to do as a little adoptee, it was how to keep secrets, how to hide behind the metaphor. I learned quickly that what I had to say about how I felt was unwelcome in conversation. Maybe you've felt as though your story has been stifled, too. That’s why it’s always a big deal when I send writing out into the world. My writing is the only place where I unabashedly tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Welcome to it.

For the past several years, I’ve been taking the time to focus on becoming the best version of myself, but to do that, I had to grapple with the first trauma that ever happened to me: my adoption. This is my life and I’ve been learning how to talk about it without hiding in my diary. This website and all it entails, then, is the clearest picture of myself that I have so far because here you will find all the different sides of me as you sift through the different stylistic approaches I’ve employed in my writing to explain who I am and why I’m here.

In my attempt to understand myself in relation to the many ways adoption has impacted my life, I have composed fiction, shared poetry, written public scholarship, posted personal blogs, studied the legal history of Texas adoption statutes, and created an academic project concerning the narrative strategies of Ghost Kingdom stories told by adoptees. Adoptees deserve better than what we’ve built for them in this country. Mothers and their children are suffering because of the way we have structured the adoption system. I cannot complacently allow it to continue without having my say. We have work to do.