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WHO IS PENNY CALLAN PARTRIDGE?

I grew up as an only child in a closed adoption. After high school, I was an English major at Stanford and then a Peace Corps Volunteer in Nigeria. Encouraged by an aunt (now a hundred years old!), I went to the Smith College School for Social Work to become a clinical social worker. My first husband had been my teacher there. He was a widower with a little girl, whom I adopted.

Not long after that, I co-founded Adoption Forum in Philadelphia. That was in 1973. In 1976, I met my birthmother; and in 1980, I became President of the American Adoption Congress. In 1986, another husband and I adopted our son in an open adoption. Nathan has grown up knowing his birthmother and brother.

Meanwhile, I had always - even before I could read and write - liked poetry. This was helped by my adoptive mother's obviously relishing it as she read or recited it to me. But my mother was enthusiastic about a lot of things. It was poetry that reached out and grabbed me. I was close to sixty before learning that, through my birthmother, I am probably related to the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh.

Poetry has connected me to myself and, especially, to my experience(s) as an adopted person. It has also connected me in amazing ways to other people. I tell some of my best stories about this in THE PEOPLE THEY BROUGHT ME. As someone who spent the first weeks of my life with no mother there, I am very grateful for this community we've been building for anyone affected by adoption.