-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
An Experiment in Queer Parenthood
by Joseph Osmundson
NBCC and Lambda Literary Award finalist Joseph Osmundson chronicles his journey toward and away from parenthood to ask how we create and nurture queer families.
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 couple he had known since college, two women, 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 mothers 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.
"[A] moving meditation on queer family, the climate crisis, and 21st-century child rearing...Though Osmundson's story takes some heartbreaking turns, the mood is more inquisitive than melancholy: his reflections teem with the restless curiosity of someone who's devoted their professional life to asking questions. The result is at once edifying and affecting." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A narrative of queer parenthood that doesn't quite cohere." —Kirkus Reviews
"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 New York Times 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
This information about Spawning Season was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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 Village Voice, Gawker, the Feminist Wire, and elsewhere. He lives and works in New York City.
If you liked Spawning Season, try these:
by Bryan Washington
Published 2026
A life-affirming novel of family, mending, and how we learn to love, from the award-winning Bryan Washington.
by Denne Michele. Norris
Published 2026
In this heart-wrenching debut novel, a young Black gay man reckoning with the death of his father must confront his painful past—and his deepest desires around gender, love, and sex.
by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith
Published 2025
A gorgeously written and irresistibly intimate queer novel that follows one family across four generations to explore legacy and identity in all its forms.
There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are either well written or badly written. That is all.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
