Jennifer Lauck

Jennifer Lauck is an award winning journalist and the author of the New York Times Bestseller Blackbird. Featured on The Oprah Show, Winfrey told her audience, "this should have been a Book of the Month book. Read it now!"

Frank McCourt, author of the Pulitzer Prize winner, Angela's Ashes, wrote of Blackbird: Written gloriously and movingly.

The London Times wrote: Lauck has constructed a riveting narrative from the awful mess of her life. That she has managed to do so fills me with an admiration for which I cannot find words. The best I can do is to suggest that you read this book.

Blackbird went on to be translated into twenty-two languages and made the bestseller list in London, Ireland and Spain. She has traveled throughout England, Scotland, Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Holland, to speak about her writing. Lauck was given the Book Sense 76 award and was featured in Newsweek, Harper's Bazaar, Talk Magazine, People, Glamour and Writer's Digest. She was a select USA Today pick and nominated for two Oregon Book Awards.

Blackbird is used as a source reference by foster parenting organizations nationwide, providing caregivers with inspiration and insight about taking in parentless children. Blackbird is also used at The Dougy Center, helping children who are grieving the loss of a parent. Lauck has been in collaboration with Yale professors and partners in the Post Traumatic Stress Center in New Haven, Connecticut, Hadar Lubin, MD and David Reed Johnson, Ph. D. Their center routinely gives out copies of Blackbird and Still Waters to patients working to heal childhood trauma.

Lauck followed Blackbird with the sequel Still Waters and a collection of short stories titled Show Me the Way. Lauck is now at work on her fourth memoir titled Found, about the search and reunion with her birth mother. All of her writing explores the complexity of human existence as well as the depths of loss. By ten, she was homeless in Los Angeles, after the deaths of her adoptive mother and father. Raised by extended family, she also suffered the loss of her adoptive brother who took his life when she was 20 years old. With humor and humility, Lauck writes and speaks about perseverance, courage and the remarkable capacity of humans to transcend the worst of losses with grace.