About Me

My name is Dawn and I have two kids and a delightfully odd husband, Brett. My children are Noah (born to us in 1997) and Madison (born to her first mom, Pennie*, in 2004 and brought to our family through a domestic, open adoption). I’m a freelancer and we also homeschool and I’m in grad school. This means my life looks a lot like that webcam shot there. Me, diligently working. Madison hollering. Noah off somewhere with a book.

I have been blogging since 2001 (but I have steadily been taking down my archives so they don’t go that far back). My blog has been featured in Parenting Magazine (as a 2010 Must Read Mom), Time Magazine, the Washington Times, and is listed as a “best adoption blog” on Adoptive Families magazine web site.

My freelance work has appeared in Salon.com; Brain Child (my essay “You’re Not the Boss of Me” about non-coercive parenting was reprinted in both Utne and Ode); Parenting, Yoga Journal, Wondertime, Adoptive Families, Bitch: A Feminist Response to Pop Culture and Greater Good.  My Salon.com essay also appears as “Sharing Madison” in Rebecca Walker’s anthology One Big Happy Family (Riverhead Press, 2009) and my essay, “Someone Else’s Shoes”, which is about the way blogging here impacted my adoption experience, appears in the book Mothering and Blogging: Theory and Practice (Demeter Press, 2009). (My official freelance site is here.) I’m also the managing editor for Support for Special Needs.

I am represented by the Doris S. Michaels Literary Agency.

* I referred to Pennie as J when we first matched and then by her actual name Jessica later on. Pennie is her nickname and that’s what we call her in real life.