A couple of announcements need spreading today.

First, the National Council for Adoption has one out about an upcoming national summit to address parent recruitment and training strategies for children in foster care.

It's to be held in Washington D.C. on the 3rd of October ... Rodney Atkins will be there. The idea is to put together a consensus statement to widely desemminate to educate, policy makers, the media, and the public about the need for adoptive and foster parent recruitment and foster care financing reform.

The contact for info is lallen@adoptioncouncil.org.

Next is the University of Pittsburgh's hosting of the Second International Conference of Adoption and Culture, taking place from the 11th to the 14th of October in their Frick Fine Arts Building.

More than 80 speakers are scheduled including literary critics, writers, anthropologists, philosophers, historians, sociologists, legal theorists, psychologists, filmmakers, and activists from Spain, Norway, China, Russia, England, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States, among other countries.

Authors of such works as, “Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama”, “Adoption-A Two-Way Street,” “Wuhu Diary: On Taking My Adopted Child Back to Her Hometown in China”, “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty and Shattered Bonds”, “Birthright: The Guide to Search and Reunion for Adoptees, Birthparents, and Adoptive Parents”, will be sharing their thoughts, views and knowledge at the conference.

For more information e-mail adoptnew@pitt.edu or visit this site.

Speaking of authors of adoption-related books, here's one who's supposed to be funny ... Lauren Weedman, a comedian who kicked off a hopeful TV career on "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart."

She'll be performing and reading from one of her works in Seattle in October 4th -6th.

"A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body: Tales From a Life of Cringe" (Sasquatch Books, 205 pages, $16.95) is a hilarious collection of stories about Weedman's life, exaggerated to the extreme or condensed to suit the story, but with the basic facts intact. On the phone from Los Angeles. Weedman said that her friends and those familiar with her stage material will recognize some of the stories. "They are mined from my life," she said. "My friends might even say, 'OK, Lauren, we get it. You're adopted.' "

See the link for info on where and when.

And one more ... Sun Yung Shin is going to be discussing her new book, “Outsiders Within: Writings on Trans-Racial Adoption" in Minneapolis on the 9th of October along with Jane Jeong Trenka and Julia Chinyere Oparah.

The topic is, of course, transracial adoption.

Moving beyond personal narrative, these transracially adopted writers from around the world tackle difficult questions about how to survive the racist and ethnocentric worlds they inhabit, what connects the countries relinquishing their children to the countries importing them, why poor families of color have their children removed rather than supported--about who, ultimately, they are. In their inquiry, they unseat conventional understandings of adoption politics, ultimately reframing the controversy as a debate that encompasses human rights, peace, and reproductive justice.