Nikkya Hargrove's powerful memoir Mama: A Queer Black Woman’s Story of a Family Lost and Found follows her journey as she makes the decision to raise her third half sibling, Jonathan, after he was born to her mother, who had a crack cocaine addiction and spent time incarcerated while Nikkya was raised by her grandparents. The book traces Nikkya’s path toward custody and adoption, her family’s perspective on her queerness, and the way she finds love and forms a family.

Nikkya Hargrove is a 2012 LAMBDA Literary Nonfiction Fellow and has written about adoption, same-sex multi-ethnic marriage, motherhood as a gay woman, and the prison system for The Washington Post, the Guardian, the New York Times, Scary Mommy, and Shondaland, among many others. She has worked for social impact nonprofits providing support to underserved communities throughout her professional career. She graduated from Bard College and lives in Connecticut with her wife and three children.

Author website: https://www.nikkyamhargrove.com/

Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/nikkyahargrove/

Sandra Chwialkowska is a television producer and writer whose first novel, The Ends of Things, is a psychological suspense that explores female friendship and agency, and pushes back against the trope of the helpless female as a “perfect victim.” Her prolific years of screenwriting translate into engrossing cinematic writing on the page, and this novel grew out of her own fears of traveling alone as a woman.

Sandra Chwialkowska is a television writer and producer who splits her time between Los Angeles and Toronto. Most recently, she served as writer and co–executive producer on the Golden Globe–nominated ABC series Alaska Daily, starring Hilary Swank. She has also developed several TV adaptations for female-centric thrillers, including Mary Kubica’s New York Times Bestseller Local Woman Missing. Sandra holds a BA in literature from Yale.

Author website: https://sandra-c.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sandrachw/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandra-chwialkowska-75603a8/

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2181319/

Amanda Fields and Holly Rizzuto Palker speak with Susan Kiyo Ito, author of I Would Meet You Anywhere, about adoption, the complexities of meeting one's birth mother, and reproductive freedom. Seeking her birth mother and fighting for reproductive rights inspires Susan to find the power of support in community and answers through her writing.

A finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award and a Finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, I Would Meet You Anywhere is the stirring culmination of Ito’s decision to embrace her right to know and tell her own story. Growing up with adoptive nisei parents, Susan Kiyo Ito knew only that her birth mother was Japanese American and her father white. But finding and meeting her birth mother in her early twenties was only the beginning of her search for answers, history, and identity. Though the two share a physical likeness, an affinity for ice cream, and a relationship that sometimes even feels familial, there is an ever-present tension between them, as a decades-long tug-of-war pits her birth mother’s desire for anonymity against Ito’s need to know her origins, to see and be seen. Along the way, Ito grapples with her own reproductive choices, the legacy of the Japanese American incarceration experience during World War II, and the true meaning of family.

Susan Ito began reading at the age of three, and writing stories at the age six. She co-edited the literary anthology A Ghost At Heart’s Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption. Her work has appeared in The Writer, Growing Up Asian American, Choice, Hip Mama, Literary Mama, Catapult, Hyphen,The Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. She is a MacDowell colony Fellow, and has also been awarded residencies at The Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook and the Blue Mountain Center. She has performed her solo show, The Ice Cream Gene, around the US. Her theatrical adaption of Untold, stories of reproductive stigma, was produced at Brava Theater. She is a member of the Writers’ Grotto, and teaches at Mills College/Northeastern University and Bay Path University. She was one of the co-organizers of Rooted and Written, a no-fee writing workshop for writers of color. She lives in Northern California.

Author Website: https://www.thesusanito.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/susanitowriter

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesusanito/