Joseph Osmundson w/ Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, SPAWNING SEASON

Joseph Osmundson, professor of microbiology at NYU and Lambda Literary Award finalist for Virology, visits the store for his new book Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood, chronicling his journey toward and away from parenthood to ask how we create and nurture queer families. He is joined by Seattle writer and activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore.

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.

Joseph Osmundson is a professor of microbiology at New York University and the author of Virology, which was a National Book Critics Circle and Lambda Literary Award finalist. His work has been published in leading biological journals including Cell and PNAS and in the New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives and works in New York City.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the Lambda Literary Award-winning author of seven books, and the editor of six anthologies. Her new novel, Terry Dactyl, was described by the New York Times Book Review as “a remarkably grounded look at what it means to be fully alive.” Her next book, Social Distancing, will be published in March 2027, and she’s currently working on a new anthology, ACT UP Beyond New York: Stories and Strategies from a Movement to End the AIDS Crisis, out in Fall 2027 from Haymarket Books.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Elliott Bay Book Company