Day-long virtual Adoptee Literary Festival set for March 22, 2025 | By Martha Vickery (Winter 2025)
A virtual event by and for adoptee writers and authors, the Adoptee Literary Festival will be held March 22. An all-volunteer, all-adoptee-run event, the festival will provide a safe space to discuss the adoptee experience and the challenges of writing and publishing one’s own adoptee stories.
This is the second such festival of adoptee writers. The first was in 2022, and both were created and administered by a volunteer group of adoptee writers. Both the premiere 2022 festival and the upcoming event are headed up by co-founder Alice Stephens (author of the novel Famous Adopted People), with co-director Susan Ito (author of the memoir I Would Meet You Anywhere). Co-founder and poet Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello and board members Sara Easterly and Mariama J. Lockington are also co-organizers. The festival is free to attend (donations encouraged and reservations required), and will run from 11 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.
The conference will begin with a keynote speech by Shannon Gibney, an adoptee author from the Twin Cities (her memoir The Girl I Am, Was, And Never Will Be: A Speculative Memoir of Transracial Adoption is one of her books). Gibney’s keynote address will kick off the festival at 10 a.m. CT (11 a.m. ET).
Featuring adoptee writers Susan Ito, Eric Smith, Sarah Myer, Nicole Chung, and Mariama Lockington among others, the program offers four cross-genre panels open to all registrants, and four workshops open only to adoptees. Topics include: The challenges of publishing as an adopted person; writing about estrangement; queer and adopted writers; writing about the “ghost kingdoms” or lives that could have been; and writing for spoken word, personal narrative and public performance.
Participants will also be able to view a pre-recorded “sizzle reel” of 15 emerging adoptee writers reading excerpts of their own work.
Stephens said that despite all the extra work involved, the 2025 conference organizing group decided to expand on the offerings of the 2022 workshop, and sought funding to provide small honorariums for the panelists, workshop facilitators and the keynote speaker. So far, there has been an enthusiastic response to the expanded program.
Stephens said that all four workshops, which have a limited number of slots, were at capacity and closed three days after registration opened on February 11. General registration, which covers the keynote talk, panels, and readings, is ongoing.
An important part of the planning for the conference was to ensure that the conference focused on and was staffed by adoptees, down to the organizers, volunteers and presenters. The group got their wish. “Everybody involved in the conference is an adoptee,” she said.
The fast registration response to the adoptee-only workshops reveals a need, Stephens believes. “I just feel like there is a real hunger for that kind of a space,” she said. “to have writing workshops where adoptees can just be adoptees and not worry about people not understanding where they are coming from, and the special feelings adoptees have – the things most people do not think about because they are not given an authentic story of adoption.”
Another purpose of the festival is one of building solidarity and showing strength in numbers. Having a conference for this special subgroup of writers will “kind of show the world that there are authentic adoptee narratives, and that there are lots of adoptee writers and that what we are writing is very different from what the mainstream publishing industry does,” she said.
Stephens guesstimated that probably hundreds of books are published yearly with some kind of orphan theme, “but if you look at the authors, not one of them is adopted.” Stephens also has personal experience with struggling over time to get her novel published, and “there was a very fierce resistance to my adoption narrative. Publishers said they didn’t understand it and didn’t know how to market it. Meanwhile, they are churning out the books by non-adopted people because they conform to a narrative that society expects — that adoption is a heart-warming thing all of the time.”
Mainstream publishers have thoroughly missed the chance to tell stories that include the nuances and complexities of adoption, Stephens believes, and it’s not because adoptee authors have not tried to get their stories out there. Rather, it is because most publishers are convinced there is not enough reader interest, Stephens explained.
Nicole Chung, in publishing her memoir All You Can Ever Know, made the idea of adoptee memoir a possibility with her national best-seller story that spoke to a wide range of readers, Stephens added. “Since then, many memoirs by adoptees have been published, but many of them are not with the Big Five (U.S. publishing houses with numerous imprints). Many are by university presses or smaller presses.” Although memoirs are making some headway, fictional works by adoptees has still not gotten enough attention, Stephens said.
Stephens said she is committed to the Adoptee Literary Festival because, due to the nature of adoption, adoptees (and adoptee writers) are scattered across a big landscape, making an intentional community very important. “I think the adoptee writing community is a beautiful community and one where I feel really safe,” Stephens remarked. “I really believe in this mission – that adoptee writers need to be more visible and that we have to get together and be a community that tries to further our community.”
The Adoptee Literary Festival email is: adopteeliteraryfestival@gmail.com. The website with registration information is: AdopteeLitFest.com.
