Belonging Matters is meant to support the adoption community, while creating a conversation with those not directly touched by adoption. The collection addresses the questions:

• If you are part of the adoption universe, how do you find identity, family, and community
• If someone you know is adopted, how do you understand and support them in their search for identity, family, and belonging
• How do we improve the adoption experience to invoke social change that benefits the individual, the family unit, and the communities in which they live

This collection is about examining all that makes us unique, and it is about finding meaning and healing from the difficulties we encounter in life.

Author Bio

Julie Ryan McGue is an American writer. She is a domestic adoptee and an identical twin. Her award-winning memoir, Twice a Daughter: A Search for Identity, Family, and Belonging, was released in May 2021. It is about her five-year search to locate birth relatives, family medical history, and personal background. In Julie’s weekly blog and monthly column (The Beacher Newspapers), she writes about finding out who you are and where you belong, and making sense of it. Her work has appeared in the Story Circle Network Journal, Brevity Nonfiction Blog, Imprint News, Adoption.com, Lifetime Adoption Adoptive Families Blog, Adoption & Beyond, and Severance Magazine. Her personal essays have appeared in several anthologies: Real Women Write: Seeing Through Her Eyes (Story Circle Network), and Art in the Time of Unbearable Crisis (She Writes Press, 2022).

Julie holds a BA in psychology from Indiana University and an MM in marketing and finance from the Kellogg Graduate School of Business, Northwestern University. She splits her time between northwest Indiana and Sarasota, Florida. She is a past board member for the Midwest Adoption Center, and she currently serves on the board of directors for the Center for American Family Building. Julie’s second memoir (She Writes Press) launches Fall 2024.