Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood by Osmundson, Joseph
Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood by Osmundson, Joseph

Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood

"Osmundson's 2022 essay collection Virology established the NYU professor as a voice of his generation...In Spawning Season,...
$33.58 USD
$33.58 USD
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Author: Joseph Osmundson
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Subtotal: $33.58
Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood by Osmundson, Joseph

Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood

$33.58
Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood by Osmundson, Joseph

Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood

$33.58
Author: Joseph Osmundson
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Description

"Osmundson's 2022 essay collection Virology established the NYU professor as a voice of his generation...In Spawning Season, Osmundson looks at queer parenthood and the natural world" -Boston Globe

"A singular and deeply moving book. Osmundson has birthed a profound meditation on family and food, longing and loss, hope and grief, humans and salmon. In his story, we find a multitude of beautiful, complicated ways of imagining the future-and then working to build one." -Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize-winner and New York Times bestselling author of An Immense World

From the author of National Book Critics Circle Award and Lambda Literary Award finalist VIROLOGY comes an intimate chronicle of queer family-making.

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.

Author: Joseph Osmundson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 05/26/2026
Pages: 208
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.70w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9781639737833


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 03/16/2026

About the Author
Joseph Osmundson is a professor of microbiology at New York University and the author of Virology. His work has been published in leading biological journals including Cell and PNAS and in the New York Times, the Atlantic, TIME, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives and works in New York City.
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