Shannon Gibney

March 23, 2023

The Power of Insisting on the In-between

Shannon Gibney is a writer, educator, activist, and the author of See No Color (Carolrhoda Lab, 2015), and Dream Country (Dutton, 2018) young adult novels that won Minnesota Book Awards in 2016 and 2019. Gibney is faculty in English at Minneapolis College, where she teaches writing. A Bush Artist and McKnight Writing Fellow, her new novel, The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be, explores themes of transracial adoption through speculative memoir (Dutton, 2023). Gibney’s other upcoming publications include the picture books Sam and the Incredible African and American Food Fight (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), and Where We Come From (Lerner, 2022; coauthored), and a YA anthology of stories by adoptees about adoptees, co-edited with Nicole Chung (HarperTeen, 2023).

Shannon's talk, "The Power of Insisting on the In-between", explored and deeply dove into her latest book project The Girl I am, Was, and Never Will Be. During the talk, she read from excerpts from her book and spoke about how she created an alternate reality. This was the first Chase Lecture about the sub-literary genre of adoption narratives. New to this genre was Shannon's perspective of being transracial. The conversation navigated between wanting to know her biological parents, but primarily wanting to know more about the absent Blackness of her life. 

View photos from the 2023 Chase Lecture with Shannon Gibney