Conference Keynotes & Speakers
Keynotes for our 2024 conference:
JaeRan Kim, Ph.D., MSW, (she/hers)
is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work and Criminal Justice at the University of Washington at Tacoma. Currently, JaeRan’s research is focused on the post-adoption experience for adoptees. JaeRan is passionate about engaging in community-based projects and has been blogging at Harlow’s Monkey, which focuses on the transracial/transnational adoptee experience, since 2006. |
Astrid Castro
(she/her/hers) founder/CEO of Adoption Mosaic, an adoptee-led, BIPOC woman-owned business that creates for and connects our adoption constellation community through adoptee-centered events, education courses, and consultations. For over three decades, Astrid has served the adoption constellation through a variety of innovative programing designed to highlight the adoptee experience. Prior to creating Adoption Mosaic, Astrid worked in both the private and public sectors of various adoption organizations such the Oregon Post Adoption Resource Center (ORPARC), Holt International and Rocky Mountain Adoption Exchange, to name just a few. Astrid is aware of the benefits of post-adoption services for individuals and their families and seeks to bring these services to the adoption community. Her life-long interest in adoption is rooted in her own adoption at the age of four from Colombia (along with her older sister). Astrid has been in reunion since December 2012 with her birth family in Colombia. |
Friday's Speakers
Max Weinberg has been a teacher and administrator in New York and Illinois schools. Max currently consults school leadership teams in Chicago and Milwaukee to maximize outcomes. He appreciates the complexity of schoolhouses and the varied learning that happens in classrooms and beyond. Max is an adoptive parent with his partner to two wonderful children. His family is a transracial adoptive family living outside of Chicago. Max's personal and professional life intersect through research on understanding optimal conditions and practices for supporting adopted/looked after children in school. He is a Ph.D. Candidate in Educational Leadership at Concordia University Chicago.
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Isaac Etter is an adoptee and social entrepreneur who was transracially adopted at the age of two. He founded Identity, a startup focused on helping adoptive and foster families thrive. At Identity, Isaac is working on re-imagining post-placement support for adoptive and foster families. He uses his story and deep passion for adoption and foster care education to bring relevant, quality, and diverse resources to adoptive and foster parents.
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Heena Khan is a Licensed Professional Counselor Supervisor and Registered Play Therapist Supervisor. She is the founder & Clinical Director of her group private practice in Allen, TX-Uplift Counseling Services with a stellar team of therapists. Her practice serves all age groups, but Heena specializes in trauma, grief, adoption and perinatal mental health. She provides CEU trainings, online courses, professional development and consultation to Therapists. She’s also the Clinical Director at a local non-profit that serves victims of domestic violence and trauma.
Dr. Joyce Maguire Pavao is Founder and CEO of PACT (Pre/Post Adoption Consulting and Training), in Cambridge, MA, she is a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and she has founded Riverside AACT (After Adoption Consulting and Training) through Riverside Community Care. She has developed models for treatment, training, and consultation on issues in adoption and other complex blended families and has over forty years of experience in this field. Dr. Pavao is an adopted person who has been in reunion for over forty years and has great love and appreciation for her families by birth and by adoption.
Suzanne Bachner is an award-winning playwright, director and adoptee rights advocate. She is a domestic same-race adopted person from NYC via Louise Wise Services. Her many acclaimed adoption-themed plays include The Good Adoptee, which has toured to the London International Fringe Festival and across the U.S. in support of law and life-changing Adoptee Rights advocacy with incredible partner organizations. TheGoodAdoptee.com
Katherin Garland is an award-winning writer, blogger, and author based in Florida. She uses creative nonfiction to de-marginalize women’s experiences and to highlight and humanize contemporary issues. Her debut memoir, In Search of a Salve: Memoir of a Sex Addict, weaves her adoption story throughout a coming-of-age narrative to demonstrate the interrelated issues that can lead to unhealthy coping mechanisms.
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Tarcia Smith is the host of the Adoption Journey Podcast. Each guest represents a part of the constellation and is encouraged to share their truth, offering an alternative perspective to mainstream adoption narratives and creating a therapeutic environment for listeners and speakers. The Adoption Journey Podcast has helped thousands of people worldwide to better navigate the complex issues of adoption.
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Bethany Fraser, host of The Adoptee Diaries podcast, is an adoptee and outspoken child welfare advocate focused on reforming systems impacting children affected by parental incarceration, adoption, and foster care. By sharing her story of self-discovery, she provides audiences with tools and resources that support truth, trust, and transparency, offering a path of community, hope, and healing.
Kelly Rich is Assistant Professor of English at Wellesley College and a Korean transnational adoptee. She is the author of States of Repair: The Promise of Welfare in the Postwar British and Anglophone Novel (Oxford University Press, 2023), and is currently at work on her second book project, Children of Conflict: Cultural Formations of Transnational Adoption. With Nicole M. Rizzuto and Susan Zieger, she co-edited the MLA-prize winning collection The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure: Race, Affect, Environment (Northwestern University Press, 2022).
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Sarah Hae-In Idzik is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University, where she researches rhetorics of transnational, transracial adoption as they intersect with race and empire, and teaches courses on race and rhetoric, Asian American studies, and rhetorics of empire.
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Marianne Novy is a professor emerita of English and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and an adoptee who met her birthmother at 32 and maintained the relationship. She co-founded the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture, edited Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture (Michigan, 2001), and wrote Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama (Michigan, 2005). This summer Temple University Press published her book Adoption Memoirs: Inside Stories.
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Linda R. Sexton is an open adoption pioneer, speaker, author, and a gold medal recipient in Florida Writers Association's prestigious Royal Palm Literary Awards. She also retired as an executive of a Fortune 100 company, yet her greatest joy in life remains the adoption and parenting of two children in 1994 and 1998 in open arrangements. Learn more at lindarsexton.com.
Ereka Howard is a speaker, co-author, Certified Life Coach, Clinician and Adoptee. Since the precocious age of eight, Ms. Ereka Howard has graced and impacted audiences throughout the nation alongside with her adoptive mother. Ms. Ereka Howard has been recognized as an authority on motivation, peak performance and peer leadership which have made her well respected amongst her community and audience.
Christelle Pellecuer is a transracial adoptee, adopted from Madagascar to France at the age of 10 years old. She spends her time between Portugal and the UK. She is a coach, multidisciplinary artist and host of Black Adoptees Identities podcast.
Brad Ewell is a late discovery adoptee and board member for Right to Know. He learned he was adopted in 2019 at 48 years old. Since that discovery he has been in reunion with both sides of his bio-family who have been an incredible addition to his life. Brad lives in Texas with his wife and three children.
Dr. Chaitra Wirta-Leiker is a licensed psychologist, international/transracial adoptee of color, and an adoptive parent. She specializes in providing mental health support focused on adoption, trauma, and racial identity work. She is the creator of the National Adoptee-Therapist Directory, and the author of “The Adoptee Self-Reflection Journal,” “The Adoptive Parent Self-Reflection Journal,” and the “Adoptees Like Me” children’s books.
Shelley Gaske is an Oregon-based adoptee, writer, and teacher. A 2024 Best American Essays nominee, she attended the Iowa Summer Writers' Workshop for fiction and Disquiet International for creative nonfiction. Her work appears in 68 to 05, HerStry, The Broadkill Review, and elsewhere.
Dr. Liz deBetta, creator of Migrating Toward Wholeness© is an adoptee and independent scholar-artist-activist committed to changing systems and helping people navigate trauma through creative processes. She believes that stories are powerful change agents and when we write them and share them we connect and heal. She has published articles on autoethnography and adoptee narratives, has an award-winning one woman show called Un-M-Othered, and facilitates trauma informed healing workshops for adoptees and women. Her book Adult Adoptees and Writing to Heal: Migrating Toward Wholeness is available from Brill Publishers.
Saturday's Speakers
Sara DeRoo is a licensed clinical social worker living in the Tampa Bay area. She is an adoptee as well as adoptive mother of a large transracial family. She has written her first book, "Loving Desmond" with her incarcerated son Desmond, adopted from foster care. Sara works in private practice as a therapist , trauma specialist. She enjoys especially working with families impacted by adoption or foster care.
Marci Purcell
Marci is committed to reform and social change relating to the rights of adult adoptees and foster care alumni, as well as truth and transparency in all aspects of adoption. Marci holds a degree in psychology and certificates in mediation, peer support, and psychological first aid. When she is not working toward reform in adoption, she is busy writing, running her vintage small business, and staying active with her family. |
Justin Hvitfeldt-Matthews was adopted at a month old through Catholic Social Services in Wisconsin. A mixed-race child, he was adopted into a highly educated white family who already had a daughter and chose to expand their family through adoption rather than biology. While born in Madison, Wisconsin, Justin spent his childhood as a third-culture kid moving from Wisconsin to Germany, Zambia, Thailand, and Malaysia over the course of his first 18 years. After college, he met both his biological parents which was the beginning of the path that led to estrangement. Over the next twenty years, conflicts stemming from changing his name and awakening to the reality of adoption led to a realization that the only path to mental safety was removing his parents from his life. He last spoke with his parents over five years ago, and while this separation is at times still painful, he has never questioned its necessity and its benefits.
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Lora K. Joy/Lora Alegria is a domestic, same race adoptee. She is fully estranged from her adoptive family and reunited with both maternal and paternal biological family. In 2022, she legally changed her name back to her birth name - Lora and her biological mom re-adopted her back. Lora is excited to participate in the panel to show the power and growth in healing we can experience when we prioritize our own emotional needs.
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Cherish Asha Bolton, an intercountry transracial adoptee from India, has a background in adoption education and adoptee rights advocacy through People for Ethical Adoption Reform (PEAR) and Intercountry Adoptee Voices (ICAV). With advanced degrees in history and social work, she works as a mental health therapist, focusing on religious trauma, identity formation, members of the adoption constellation, minority experiences, and sex therapy.
Monica Hall was born in Canada, adopted by American parents, and raised in Anchorage, Alaska. She spent the first sixteen years of her life there and had many of the foundational experiences that drive her writing. She has founded several successful companies and currently works in marketing. Monica is also a speaker, and life coach. She has three grown children and lives in Sacramento, California.
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Annie Hallsten Narayan is an adoptive mom, speaker, support group facilitator, retreat leader, and biographer. She is deeply committed to educating and creating a supportive environment for adoptive parents. Annie is passionate about empowering people to write their stories and passing their legacies on to future generations. She lives in Sacramento with her husband and their two kids.
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Rebecca Berg, MS, RDN is a Registered Dietitian specializing in transforming food and body relationships to support healing from disordered eating and body image concerns. Passionate about helping adult and teen adoptees, she explores food behaviors with curiosity and compassion. Rebecca combines her lived experience as a domestic infant adoptee and human fully recovered from her own eating struggles to support and guide her clients.
Katy Finn, MA is a mother via open, domestic, transracial adoption. She holds a BFA and MA in the arts. Katy uses theater techniques to explore themes of adoption including the power/privilege of the adoptive mother within the adoption constellation. Katy is a Case Manager with On Your Feet Foundation and a consultant for Spence-Chapin in New York City. Katy frequently blogs about transracial, open adoption.
Taya Reed, M.A., LPC-S is a Licensed Professional Counselor and Supervisor and the founder of Sound House Therapy PLLC. Currently her experience lends to around 14 years in practice with the last 4 years building her private practice. She is a veteran of the United States Armed Forces and received her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of Houston-Downtown and her Master’s in Counseling degree from Prairie View A&M University.
Lori Evans Emi (she/her) is an adoptee, adopter, daughter, stepdaughter, stepsister, half-sister, stepmother, single mom, author, entrepreneur, and former corporate executive turned Professional Certified Coach. Professionally, Lori has over 30 years’ experience in corporate leadership and organizational development. She is a behavioralist and is known for her expertise in team systems dynamics, behavioral assessments, motivations, values, and leadership development. She has personally coached or developed thousands of leaders globally, and she is passionate about helping her clients discover their inner truths. She works one-on-one with leaders and has expertise in team development.
María Valiente is an experienced educator and school librarian. She is passionate about trauma-informed teaching and centering adoptees in the classroom. As a librarian, she feels providing resources to adoptees and their families that center adoptee voices is essential.
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Carolina Ellis , M.ED identifies as an adoptee, Latina, veteran educator, and adoptive mom. She is providing her young adopted son with opportunities and knowledge that she wishes she had as a child.
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