In a recent interview, Beam offers Will Boisvert, Publishers Weekly, a sympathetic viewpoint regarding the challenges of foster kids and the related challenges of foster parents: “Their parents have betrayed them and they’ve been put into a home they didn’t choose they feel a fundamental contract has been broken. And then what happens as these system-reared kids become adults? Beam closely follows a group of teenagers in New York who are grappling with what aging out will mean…” She’s also been a committed foster mom of a trans girl.įrom the publisher’s description: “The book mirrors the life cycle of a foster child and so begins with the removal of babies and kids from birth families… Beam then paints an unprecedented portrait of the intricacies of growing up in the system-the back-and-forth with agencies, the shuffling between pre-adoptive homes and group homes, the emotionally charged tug of prospective adoptive parents and the fundamental pull of birth parents. For one thing, Beam was an adolescent runaway herself. There’s undoubtedly some personal history that goes into the making of this book. Kirkus Reviews calls her latest “(a)n engrossing, well-researched examination of important social issues.” To the End of June: The Intimate Life of American Foster Careis Beam’s intensive study of our child welfare system. Author and professor Cris Beam has a new book, To the End of June, that follows not only two previous award-winners about trans teens-one nonfiction book, Transparent (2007), and a young adult novel, I Am J (2011)-but also her memoir called Mother, Stranger(2012).

To the End of June by Cris Beam