What a singular and deeply moving book. In Spawning Season, Joseph Osmundson has birthed a profound meditation on family and food, longing and loss, hope and grief, humans and salmon. In his story, we find a multitude of beautiful, complicated ways of imagining the future-and then working to build one.

Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize-winner and author of NYTimes bestseller AN IMMENSE WORLD

With Spawning Season, Joseph Osmundson offers us an intimate look at the way queer theory becomes written on the body and moves through the world. Spawning Season is a book that only a queer scientist could write, and a powerful exploration of the relationships between queer men and queer women, between white queers and queers of color. A powerful rejoinder to old notions about fatherhood, emotion, and masculinity, Spawning Season is a reminder that queer theory calls on us to not just transform society but also ourselves.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, author of THE DISORDERED COSMOS

Beautiful nature writing, beautiful food writing, and above all, intimate, revealing, and heart-wrenching writing about complicated and deeply human longing for queer parenthood, and about the risk and loss inherent in putting our faith in reproductive futurity.

Krys Malcolm Belc, author of THE NATURAL MOTHER OF THE CHILD

Beautiful and deeply moving. Joseph Osmundson guides us through a topography where pleasure, kinship, gender, and procreative longing take new forms, and challenges us to expand the limits of human expression. He shows us queerness as the ultimate nurturing force, a place where cooking becomes an affirmation of chosen family, an act of love on a colossal scale.

John Birdsall, James Beard Award-winning author of THE MAN WHO ATE TOO MUCH and WHAT IS QUEER FOOD?

An aching and imaginative memoir about the many ways to have and lose a child. In Spawning Season, Joseph Osmundson unearths the confluence of his dream of becoming a queer parent alongside the odyssey of a spawning salmon. The grief that unspools in both stories will resonate with anyone who has wanted a child amid the threats of climate change and capitalism. Yet Osmundson also conjures new possibilities for the ways we nurture and nourish each other, and as such, has written a book brimming with as much hope as exists in the single glowing orb of a salmon egg.

Sabrina Imbler, author of HOW FAR THE LIGHT REACHES

Good god, this book. A thunderclap of emotion. I am rearranged. Osmundson's best work of nonfiction yet.

Lulu Miller, author of WHY FISH DON'T EXIST