Spawning Season

An Experiment in Queer Parenthood

Joseph Osmundson (Author)

Spawning Season

An Experiment in Queer Parenthood

Joseph Osmundson (Author)

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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.

Product details

Published	May 26 2026
Format	Hardback
Edition	1st
Pages	208
ISBN	9781639737833
Imprint	Bloomsbury Publishing
Dimensions	8 x 6 inches
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

Author

Joseph Osmundson

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.

Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe
Evocative...a reflection on family building, yes, but also a broader look at the interconnected systems of family, gender, race/ethnicity, and the environment; at the role and limits of biology in queer parenthood; and at what it means to nourish, nurture, hope, and grieve. Thoroughly original, thought-provoking, and entertaining, it is a highly recommended look at queer parenthood with a wide-one might say 'fish-eye'-lens.

Dana Rudolph, Bay Windows
Biophysicist Osmundson blends memoir and science writing in this moving meditation on queer family, the climate crisis, and 21st-century child-rearing.

The Millions 'Great Spring Book Preview'
What a singular and deeply moving book. In Spawning Season, Joseph 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 author of NYTimes bestseller AN IMMENSE WORLD
With Spawning Season, Joseph Osmundson offers us an intimate look at the way queer theory becomes written on the body and moves through the world. Spawning Season is a book that only a queer scientist could write, and a powerful exploration of the relationships between queer men and queer women, between white queers and queers of color. A powerful rejoinder to old notions about fatherhood, emotion, and masculinity, Spawning Season is a reminder that queer theory calls on us to not just transform society but also ourselves.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, author of THE DISORDERED COSMOS
Beautiful nature writing, beautiful food writing, and above all, intimate, revealing, and heart-wrenching writing about complicated and deeply human longing for queer parenthood, and about the risk and loss inherent in putting our faith in reproductive futurity.

Krys Malcolm Belc, author of THE NATURAL MOTHER OF THE CHILD