Hannah Andrews was born in Chicago and was adopted as an infant during the Baby Scoop Era. She was raised on a Midwestern farm with two older adoptee brothers. In 2018, a chance meeting with an author birthmother sent Hannah in search of her own history. She found more questions than answers, but found guidance and community from fellow triad members. She joined the AKA board to provide that same support to others. Hannah is a writer, pianist & pet enthusiast .  She lives in San Diego, CA with her dog Josie and three Pussycats .

Brooke Randolph, LMHC, LIMHP, LPC, LPCC-S, is a therapist, author, speaker, and trainer. She is founder and Executive Director of Counseling at The Green House, a boutique group practice with therapists focused on working with the adoption constellation in Indiana, Kentucky, Texas, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts. She is a contributing author to Adoption Therapy: Perspectives from Clients and Clinicians on Processing and Healing Post-Adoption Issues (2014), and the organizing editor of It’s Not About You: Understanding Adoptee Search, Reunion, & Open Adoption (2017). She has also authored a series of children’s workbooks and adoption education materials for parents and therapists. Brooke is a single adoptive mom, kinship care guardian, and loud and proud rugby mom. She works to maintain an open intercountry adoption and is a committed adoptee advocate. Brooke is passionate about promoting excellence in therapy, family preservation, and openness in adoption. 

Stacey M. Gatlin is the founder of Yes We Adopt, a platform dedicated to supporting Black individuals and families touched by adoption and foster care through honest education, community care, and collective healing. A servant leader and advocate, Stacey’s work is shaped by lived experience, compelling her to challenge harmful stereotypes and dominant narratives surrounding Black adoption and foster care.

She centers adoptees, fostered persons, and first families while equipping caregivers to engage adoption with courage, humility, and accountability. Stacey is the creator of the Yes We Adopt: Black Voices Amplified Summit and serves as a Board Member of Adoption Knowledge Affiliates (AKA) and a Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) in New Jersey. She speaks on adoption, family preservation, parenting without perfection, and collective healing.

Kathleen Shea Kirstein is a Late Discovery Adoptee who later learned through DNA testing that her biological father was not who she had believed. A retired nurse and mother of two sons who live in New Hampshire, Kathleen is a writer, illustrator, and artist.

She has illustrated three children’s books under the author name D. Ann Hollon and has published essays—“Dear Mother,” “Blown Off Course,” and “There Was a Secret”—in Severance Magazine.

Kathleen enjoys reading, writing, painting, drawing, and tracking airplanes. Known for her fabulous hugs, she is also famous among her former coworkers for creating handmade cards for every occasion—leaving her unit a full year’s worth of birthday cards upon retirement.

Since discovering her adoption, Kathleen has collected first names as a personal project and reflection of identity.

You can find her on Facebook as Wendy Kathleen Janet and on Instagram @kathleenkirstein.

Max Weinberg, PhD, is excited to join the AKA Board. He is a transracial adoptive parent of two teenagers who lives in Chicagoland.
Max is an experienced educator with a 25-year career that has included various roles, including teacher, principal, and school leadership coach. 
Max runs Belonging (www.belonging.education), an educational advising practice dedicated to strengthening student belonging at school through direct training and advocacy. Max’s passion for strengthening school belonging stems from personal experiences as a student and parent advocating for his children in school systems. 
Max holds a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership from Concordia University—Chicago. He also holds his Special Educator (LBS1) license and is completing his certification in English as a Second Language.

Bruce Porth was born in Chicago near the end of the baby scoop era and adopted at 10 days old into a family that was well-intentioned but lacked critical knowledge and insight in how to raise an adopted child. He started coming out of the fog in the late 90’s and eventually reunited with his birth family in 1998 and maintains a relationship that continues to expand and grow. It was in 2020 when Bruce found the broader adoptee community and a deeper level of awareness and healing became available. He discovered how essential the support of the adoptee community is in moving through the stages of healing from adoption grief and loss and came to AKA through attendance of the Male Adoptee Group. Bruce is passionate about promoting truth and transparency in adoption and hopes to give back to the community by raising awareness within the adoption constellation of the complex challenges that come with relinquishment. Bruce has a M.S. in Metallurgical Engineering and has worked in the semiconductor industry for 30 years. He is married with two daughters and lives in Vermont.

Taya Reed is a Licensed Professional Counselor and Supervisor with over 16 years of therapeutic experience, establishing her private practice, Sound House Therapy, PLLC, 6 years ago.

Adopted in 1970 during the Baby Scoop Era, Taya’s personal experience as a same-race domestic adoptee profoundly shapes her professional journey. She is a US Armed Forces veteran who served in the Gulf War.

Reuniting with both birth parents offered firsthand experience of adoption’s complexities, shaping her into a compassionate advocate and therapist for fellow adoptees.

Taya co-hosted the podcast “I Found Her” with her birth mother, inspiring her to create an adoptee-guided journal planned for publication in 2026. She has also presented at the Adoption Knowledge Affiliates conference and participated in an Adoption Mosaic panel discussion, as well as several writing groups focused on adoptee voices and narratives.

Dr. Abigail Hasberry splits her residence between San Antonio, Texas, and Baltimore, Maryland. She is a licensed marriage and family therapist, a board-certified coach, and holds a Texas school superintendent certification. Abby has earned a B.S. in African American studies and sociology, a M.A.in teaching, K-12, a M.Ed. in counseling and development-marriage and family counseling, a M.S.in industrial & organizational psychology and evidence-based coaching, and a Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction. Dr. Hasberry, a former educator and charter school founding principal, currently works as a therapist and an executive leadership coach. Abby has published on identity development and has been on several podcasts, conference keynotes, and webinars speaking on adoption, identity development, wellness, and supporting teens with anxiety. Abby is a domestic transracial adoptee in reunion, and a birth mom, also in reunion. Abby’s memoir, Adopting Privilege, was released in February of 2025.

Jean Widner is a domestic adoptee born and raised in Washington State in 1965, and currently lives in Nevada with her husband and two dogs. She only recently joined the adoption community in 2021 after searching for and finding her birth mother, which inspired her to write and research a book still in progress, https://adoptionparadox.com/.  Her adoptive parents now passed, she had a mostly positive experience being raised by them, however her mother was addicted to drugs and alcohol during her early formative years. Through writing she works to heal her internal wounds, but also pursues the larger stories and struggles left untold about adoption. In AKA she found support groups, safety, and a wealth of knowledge from like minded people facing similar struggles. She has a Bachelor’s Degree and along with her husband she has built and sold two e-commerce companies. She is also the owner of a paid small-town news blog and enjoys traveling, reading and cooking. Still not acknowledged by her first mother, she wishes to serve the adoption community by lending her talents where she can to assist the AKA organization and others in their journeys. 

Dr. Katherin Elizabeth (K E) Garland is a same-race, domestic adoptee and co-founder of Black Adoptees Meetup. She is also an independent scholar and award-winning creative nonfiction writer and blogger.

Garland uses her lived experience as a Black woman, as well as storytelling strategies to demarginalize social issues. To this end, her essays have been published in several anthologies and online magazines.

Garland’s debut memoir, In Search of a Salve: Memoir of a Sex Addict, illustrates how unresolved, interrelated trauma, including adoption, can lead to a behavioral addiction. Her book was long listed for the 2023 Santa Fe Writers Project. 

Most recently, she has used her voice to amplify the adoptee experience through planning the inaugural and second year of Black Adoptees Meetup, as well as blogging and presenting with Adoption Knowledge Affiliates.

She hopes to live in a world where truth liberates us, one word at a time.

Andrea Coates

Andrea Coates, LCSW, was raised by a parent who survived foster care and became pregnant with her while in the system. She brings an intergenerational perspective on the lasting impacts of child welfare. 

For over a decade, Andrea has volunteered as a DNA search angel, supporting adult adoptees in identity discovery while elevating awareness of original birth certificate access and the lifelong implications of maternal-child separation. 

With over 20 years of experience in behavioral health, Andrea is a corporate behavioral healthcare people leader and trauma-informed clinician and has worked with children, adolescents, and adults impacted by adoption and foster care in inpatient and outpatient settings.

Andrea holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in social work from the University of Kentucky. She lives in New England with her partner, Greg, an adoptee and active member of the adoptee community, and enjoys travel, lifelong curiosity, and time by the ocean.

Cynthia Rounds-McGuigan entered foster care at age 12 after fleeing from an abusive home. Over five years, she lived in five foster homes and faced an unplanned pregnancy, ultimately was coerced into placing her son for adoption due to limited support. With her foster parents’ help, Cynthia reunited with her biological parents in 1983. She married Jim, her son’s birth father, in 1990; they live in West Bridgewater, MA, and have three daughters and three grandchildren. Cynthia and Jim reunited with their son in 1999, though he prefers not to have face-to-face contact.

In 2007, Cynthia began advocating for adult adoptees’ access to their original birth certificates and joined the American Adoption Congress Board. Over 11 years, she served in leadership roles such as President, Treasurer, and Conference Chair.

Cynthia brings over forty years of expertise as a Financial Analyst, including more than three decades at Harvard University and her current position as Financial and Operations Manager at Cheverus School in Malden, MA. During her tenure at Harvard, she obtained her B.S. in Business Management from Fisher College (2012) and an A.L.M. in Psychology from Harvard University (2020). Cynthia has delivered presentations at various conferences, frequently drawing upon her capstone research on positive psychology and its impact on well-being after traumatic experiences.

Cynthia learned that her family has experienced multiple generations of loss and separation: her great-grandmother when she left a daughter in Ireland in 1870, her grandmother was placed in a home for unwed mothers in 1928, and her mother also endured significant personal losses when she entered foster care. These experiences have reinforced Cynthia’s dedication to advocating for foster alum and adoptees’ rights to maintain connection, understand their history, and preserve family roots.

A year after retiring from a 35-year career in corporate sales, Laura L. Engel experienced an unexpected miracle, and her life took a completely different trajectory than she had ever dreamed. She began writing about a secret in her life she had never spoken about. 

Her award-winning book “You’ll Forget This Ever Happened – secrets, shame, and adoption in the 1960s”  was published in 2022.

Laura is past president of the San Diego Memoir Writers Association and a member of The International Memoir Writers, International Women’s Writing Guild, Writers Ink in San Diego, and The National Memoir Writers. She is a speaker and has been a guest on numerous podcasts about her Memoir. The interviews topics range from writing her book and publishing at the age of seventy-three, Adoption, the Baby Scoop Era, Grief, and Writing memoirs later in life. She has had essays published in Writers Digest, Severance Magazine, and multiple journals and magazines. One of Laura’s favorite things is discussing her book with book clubs, at workshops, and with adoption and birth mother organizations. 

Chosen as Author of the Month at the San Diego Central Library in 2023, Laura’s work has been published in five different Shaking the Tree Anthologies, plus Adoption and Suicidality anthology, and Grief Like Yours anthology. Two scenes from her memoir – “You’ll Forget This Ever Happened- secrets, shame, and adoption in the 1960s” – have been performed live on stage by professional actors at the annual San Diego Memoir Showcase. 

Laura lives with her husband, Gene, and their adored Golden Retriever, Layla Louise, in San Diego’s East County. They are the proud parents of five adult children, along with their spouses, and ten beloved grandchildren.

Anna Allanbrook was the leader of an elementary school called the Brooklyn New School (a.k.a P.S 146) from 1997 until 2021 when she retired. Anna believes in paying close attention to children and in developing student voice and empathy. The Brooklyn New School was and is known for its rich curriculum, integrating the visual arts, music, theater, science, physical education, language, numeracy, and exploration.

Retirement does not mean Anna has stopped working. Today, Anna remains committed to BNS where she volunteers by teaching art, biking, and supporting the swimming program. Anna also runs an affinity group at the school for children who are adopted.

As an adult adoptee, Anna has become passionate about educating others on adoption’s impact and implication for human development. To this end, Anna works hard to support all members of the adoption triad. As a retiree, Anna has had time to read extensively about adoption, to explore adoption’s impact on herself and others, and to become an advocate within the adoption
community.

For two years, Anna was a mentor with the Adoptee Mentoring Society, a national organization dear to her heart. In this capacity, she became aware of both the diversity and commonality of the adoption experience.

Lastly, Anna is the proud grandmother of four wonderful grandchildren. She is fortunate that all of them live in Brooklyn and that she gets to be with them a lot!

Annie Jacobs became a birth mother upon relinquishing her son in 2010. She has maintained an ongoing open adoption with her son during that time, which has included anything from attending a soccer practice to flying to Hong Kong for a visit when his family moved overseas. She recognizes the complexity of open adoption and has looked for opportunities to share her narrative in hopes of expanding perception of what is to be a birth parent and what open adoption can look like and what that means for all involved. This included creating online community through blogging, writing chapters in two published anthologies, speaking on panels at more than 10 conferences, and helping plan and participate in birth mother events and support groups. 

Outside of adoption, Annie has worked as a production manager in theatre for over 20 years, giving her extensive experience planning live events. The last 15 years she has worked exclusively in small non-profit theatre, giving her experience in all aspects of non-profit administration. This has included financials, strategic planning, marketing, and work in development – including grant writing and planning of fundraisers.