Monday, June 8, 2026 at 7:00 PM
Skylight Books, Los Angeles
 CLICK HERE TO RSVP _**RSVP is recommended but not required. Entry and seating are first-come, first-served. RSVPs do not guarantee entry to a full event.**_ **From the author of National Book Critics Circle Award and Lambda Literary Award finalist VIROLOGY comes an intimate chronicle of queer family-making.** Since grade school, Joseph Osmundson dreamed of being pregnant. As he grew into the queer scientist he is today, the economic precarity of academia and the warming planet led to his decision not to reproduce. That is, until a lesbian couple he had known since college came to him with a proposition: would Joe be a bio-dad and would he co-parent alongside them? Soon everything was falling into place. But when the two partners communicated their need for a child to reflect their own racial backgrounds, Joe's whiteness exposed fault lines in their parenting journey. _Spawning Season_ is a genre-bending memoir that treats the scientific as integral to the personal and that builds an entire species of the grief we carry in our bodies. In exploratory prose that builds on the work of Donna Haraway and José Esteban Muñoz, Osmundson considers the ethics of child-rearing in the 21st century, the brutal wonder of caregiving, and the joys and intricacies of building family beyond biology. **Joseph Osmundson** is a professor of microbiology at New York University and the author of the National Book Critics Circle and Lambda Literary Award Finalist Virology. His work has been published in leading biological journals including Cell and PNAS and in the New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives and works in New York City. **Tommy “Teebs” Pico** is a poet, artist, and tv writer. He is author of the books IRL, Nature Poem, Junk, Feed, and has written on the shows Reservation Dogs, Resident Alien and Crystal Lake. Originally from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, he now lives in Los Angeles where he makes abstract portraits with various kinds of wax, acrylics, watercolors, food coloring and India ink. **Keiko Lane** is an Okinawan American writer, teacher, and psychotherapist. Her current projects explore the affective legacy of her family's history of wartime incarceration and forced family separation. Her first book, Blood Loss: A Love Story of AIDS, Activism, and Art, a memoir about queer family and devotion in ACT UP and Queer Nation Los Angeles, was published by Duke University Press in 2024.