Spawning Season
- Author Joseph Osmundson
- Narrator Joseph Osmundson
- Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
- Publish Date 26 May 2026
- Run Time 8 hours and 25 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Memoirs.
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What to expect
"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.
“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.
Critics Review
Anchored by a poignant account of his efforts to become a father, this memoir, by a microbiologist, is also a wide-ranging meditation on what it means to be biologically “fit” in Western society today...[Osmundson's] emotional journey will be instantly recognizable to anyone whose dreams of having a child have been dashed or deferred.
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.
An utterly unique contribution to the often predictable genre of infertility and parenting lit...Spawning Season is, among other things, a deeply personal exploration of 'situational infertility,' the voluntary or involuntary lack of children due to external factors...It’s rare to read a well-researched nonfiction narrative that blends fascinating specialized knowledge with sharp political critique and a moving, gripping personal story.
I tore through this book in one sitting, falling in love with the sentences, the way that the book unfolded, how it could have also easily been a food memoir, and the way in which he explicates the science of it all.
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.
Biophysicist Osmundson blends memoir and science writing in this moving meditation on queer family, the climate crisis, and 21st-century child-rearing.
In this intriguing combination of memoir and nature writing, microbiology professor Joseph Osmundson reflects on modern queer parenthood and finds unlikely reflections of his own journey in the animal world. He draws thought-provoking parallels between the lifecycle of salmon and the agreement he made with a lesbian couple he’d known since college to co-parent. With deep considerations of the ethics of having children during a climate crisis, humanity’s role in the natural world, and breaking societal expectations of family structures, it’s an emotional and introspective personal story.
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.
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.
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.
Beautiful and deeply moving. Joseph Osmundson guides us through a topography where pleasure, kinship, gender, and procreative longing take new forms, and challenges us to expand the limits of human expression. He shows us queerness as the ultimate nurturing force, a place where cooking becomes an affirmation of chosen family, an act of love on a colossal scale.
An aching and imaginative memoir about the many ways to have and lose a child. In Spawning Season, Joseph Osmundson unearths the confluence of his dream of becoming a queer parent alongside the odyssey of a spawning salmon. The grief that unspools in both stories will resonate with anyone who has wanted a child amid the threats of climate change and capitalism. Yet Osmundson also conjures new possibilities for the ways we nurture and nourish each other, and as such, has written a book brimming with as much hope as exists in the single glowing orb of a salmon egg.
Good god, this book. A thunderclap of emotion. I am rearranged. Osmundson's best work of nonfiction yet.
I am a Joseph Osmundson stan, and I have no idea how Osmundson made Spawning Season. It is delicate, probing, surprisingly fun, and geniusly patient when I most needed to believe books could save parts of us. Parenting stories do not look, end or begin as we believe, and Osmundson will have you stomping for joy at acceptance of our shared paradox.
Biophysicist Osmundson (Virology) blends memoir and science writing in this moving meditation on queer family, the climate crisis, and 21st-century child rearing...His reflections teem with the curiosity of someone who's devoted their professional life to asking questions. The result is at once edifying and affecting.
| Author | Joseph Osmundson |
|---|---|
| Narrator | Joseph Osmundson |
| Duration | 8 hours and 25 minutes |
| Release Date | |
| ISBN | 9781639737857 |
| Format | Audiobook |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Genre | Memoirs |
| Availability | AU, GB, IE, US |
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