Joseph Osmundson
“Showing queer bodies and what we do with them is both personal and political to me. Queer bodies were so sanitized in the quest for gay rights. We were made politically palatable. And that meant we weren’t supposed to be sexual in public. Well, human beings are often sexual, and I have no interest in cleaving that portion of myself off.”
“An aching and imaginative memoir about the many ways to have and lose a child. In Spawning Season, Joseph Osmundson unearths the confluence of his dream of becoming a queer parent alongside the odyssey of a spawning salmon. The grief that unspools in both stories will resonate with anyone who has wanted a child amid the threats of climate change and capitalism. Yet Osmundson also conjures new possibilities for the ways we nurture and nourish each other, and as such, has written a book brimming with as much hope as exists in the single glowing orb of a salmon egg.”
“Osmundson has created a stunningly beautiful and important book.”
“Queer pedagogy at its best: non-patronizing, thoroughly smart, and full of urgent and caring knowledge that beckons us to get closer again with caution and passion.”
“I have absolutely no idea how Osmundson made a book this timely, this timeless, this packed with contents and styles we aren’t supposed to experience in one text. Virology is devastating in its soulful brilliance. Rigor just became cool as fuck and pleasurable again.”
“Joseph Osmundson’s Virology is an incisive look at our relationship to earth’s most plentiful life form — how we live with viruses and how viruses live in and through us. But more than this, it is a compelling examination of the tension between avoidance and exposure, safety and risk, preservation of the self and openness to evolution and change. This book is a potent medicine for our times.”
“I wish I’d had this book when I was 22 and making mistakes all over the world. I might have made fewer, might have made more, but I might have loved myself better the whole time. Bold, wise, percussive delight – Joseph Osmundson brings to the page the candor of the empty bed, and the full one, too. Inside/Out is like if Maggie Nelson had written Bluets about fucking men.”
Joseph Osmundson is a scientist and writer based in New York City. His latest book is Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenting (Bloomsbury, 2026). He is also the author of Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between (W.W. Norton & Co. 2022), which was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His previous book, Inside/Out (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018), was praised by Kiese Laymon, who commented, “I don't know that there is a writer in this country doing as much with queer theory, narrative momentum, whiteness, sexual identity and the literal outside as Joseph Osmundson.” His debut book, Capsid: A Love Song (Indolent Books, 2016), won the POZ Award for best HIV writing (fiction/poetry) and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. His writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Gawker, The Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, The Lambda Literary Review, The Feminist Wire, and elsewhere.
In an interview with The Rumpus, Osmundson was asked what his forthcoming book, Virology, addresses: “As you know, I’m a scientist, and this book does a lot more of the lyric science writing that I so love. It puts my life and sex and family on the same page as the molecules that build our bodies, our pleasures. I’ve wanted a family since I was like five, and as I grow older it seems more and more impossible because families rely on other people. Having kids takes money. Money and other people have been the great struggles of my life. The book is an attempt to understand where I come from and why, as a queer body, I need these things so badly, and how I can try not to succumb to the fact that all bodies, even and especially our own bodies, will eventually let us down with their/our fallibility.”
His scientific research has been supported by the American Cancer Society and published in leading biological journals including Cell and PNAS. He has a PhD from The Rockefeller University in Molecular Biophysics, and is currently a Clinical Associate Professor of Biology at NYU.
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(c) Ted Ely
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