Spawning Season cover art

Spawning Season

An Experiment in Queer Parenthood

Pre-order: Try Premium Plus free
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Unlimited access to our all-you-can-listen catalogue of 15K+ audiobooks and podcasts
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Spawning Season

By: Joseph Osmundson
Pre-order: Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Pre-order Now for £12.51

Pre-order Now for £12.51

About this listen

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

“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

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.©2026 Joseph Osmundson (P)2026 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
LGBTQ+ Studies Parenting & Families Relationships
No reviews yet