Angela Tucker with Marcus Harrison Green

Angela Tucker, the executive director of the Adoptee Mentoring Society, details her own experience as a transracial adoptee in the memoir You Should Be Grateful: Stories of Race Identity, and Transracial Adoption and makes a case for reimagining norms and assumptions embedded in adoption policy and practice. She'll be joined in conversation by acclaimed local journalist and founder of the South Seattle Emerald, Marcus Harrison Green. In You Should Be Grateful: Stories of Race Identity, and Transracial Adoption, Angela Tucker layers her personal history with research and anecdotes from her roles as adoption caseworker, workshop facilitator, and mentor for transracial adoptees. This interlacing creates a rich texture that reflects the complexity of the opportunities and challenges faced by adoptees—particularly children of color adopted by White families in White communities. The author’s own narrative of searching, finding, and maintaining relationships with members of her birth family provides a resonant background for her analysis of the systemic inequities surrounding adoption and the racism underlying transracial adoption’s inflection points. The author’s passion for and knowledge about the topic are extensive, and her story is a compelling context against which to wrestle with themes of belonging, autonomy, family, and agency. Her struggle also reveals how adoption’s problems have no clear heroes or easy, final answers. As she notes, “writing honestly about adoption seems to inevitably hurt someone or to risk being misconstrued.” By engaging with these complexities, making space for conflicting truths, and handling her subject and its characters with empathy, Tucker emerges as a promising and determined voice poised to lead the change she calls for in the adoption industry. Angela Tucker is a Black woman adopted from foster care to white parents. Her forthcoming debut book: You Should Be Grateful: Stories of Race Identity, and Transracial Adoption, will be published in April 2023 by Beacon Press. Angela is the subject of Closure, a documentary that chronicles her search for her biological parents. Her mission; to center adoptees is evident in her podcast, The Adoptee Next Door, and each of the five short films that she has produced. Angela was a consultant for NBC’s television show, This Is Us, and supported the lead actor of Broadway musical Jagged Little Pill, has over 15 years of experience working within adoption and foster care agencies and has mentored over 200 adoptees, leading her to found the Adoptee Mentoring Society. Angela is married to Bryan Tucker, an Emmy-award winning filmmaker. They live in Seattle, Washington. Marcus Harrison Green is the publisher of the South Seattle Emerald, and a columnist with the Seattle Times. Growing up in South Seattle, he experienced first-hand the impact of one-dimensional stories on marginalized communities, which taught him the value of authentic narratives. This led him to become a writer and found the South Seattle Emerald. An award-winning journalist, he was awarded the Seattle Human Rights Commissions’ Individual Human Rights Leader Award for 2020, and named the inaugural James Baldwin Fellow by the Northwest African American Museum in 2022. His book Readying to Rise was named a 2022 Washington State Book Award Finalist.

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