Trish Maskew teaches adoption law, policy and practice at American University Washington College of Law. She founded Ethica, an adoption advocacy organization that works for ethical adoption practices internationally. She wrote Our Own: Adopting and Parenting the Older Child.

Randall L. Kennedy is the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He wrote Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity and Adoption, an examination of the role of race in those arenas.

Heather Jacobson is assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at the University of Texas at Arlington. Her interests include sociology of families, the intersection of social inequality (race, class, gender) and families and family formation.

Marilyn Holt is a historian of American orphanages and an expert on the history of American Indian adoption. She wrote Indian Orphanages and The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America.

Karen Dubinsky is a professor of history of gender and sexuality, history of tourism, transnational/transracial adoption 
and the global politics of childhood at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

Karen Balcom is an assistant professor of history and women’s studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. She is an expert on historical aspects of adoption up to the 1960s, including the history of social welfare policy in the U.S. and Canada and women’s reform networks. She wrote “‘Phony Mothers’ and Border-Crossing Adoptions: The […]

Linda S. Spears is the vice president of the Child Welfare League of America. She has been a social worker, manager and agency head and is a former director of field support for the Massachusetts Department of Social Services. An enrolled member of the Narragansett Indian Tribe, she is expert on issues of Indian child […]

Adam Pertman is the executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute in New York City. He wrote Adoption Nation: How the Adoption Revolution is Transforming America.

Marianne Novy is a professor of English and women’s studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She wrote Reading Adoption: Family and Differences in Fiction and Drama, a book about adoption themes in literature.