About this item
A triumph of narrative reporting and storytelling. .. . Beam gives foster children a much-needed voice and does what too many adults in the foster-care system cant, or wont She advocates for them.-- NewYork Times Book ReviewWho are the children of foster care What, as a country, do we owe them Cris Beam, a foster mother herself, spent five years immersed in the world of foster care, looking into these questions and tracing firsthand stories. The result is To the End of June, an unforgettable portrait that takes us deep inside the lives of foster children at the critical points in their search for a stable, loving family. The book mirrors the life cycle of a foster child and so begins with the removal of babies and kids from birth families. Theres a teenage birth mother in Texas who signs away her parental rights on a napkin only to later reconsider, crushing the hopes of her babys adoptive parents.
About the Author
Cris Beam's most recent book is To The End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) . Her first book was Transparent: Love, Family and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers (Harcourt, 2007) which won a Lambda Literary Award and was a Stonewall Honor Book. Her young adult novel, I am J, was released by Little, Brown in March 2011, and was named a Kirkus Best Book and Library Guild Selection of 2011, and is the first book with a transgender character to be placed on the state of California's recommended reading list for public high schools. Her short memoir, Mother, Stranger was published by The Atavist in 2012 and quickly reached the top ten on Kindle Singles. Cris teaches creative writing at Columbia University, New York University, and Bayview Women's Correctional Facility. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia and lives in New York City. She's currently working on a novel.
