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Writers Langston Hughes 1901-1967 James Mercer Langston Hughes (1901 – 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. Hughes was born in Missouri. His father abandoned the family soon after the birth. After his parents divorced, he was raised by his maternal grandmother in Kansas as his mother needed to travel for work. When his grandmother died, Hughes lived with family friends for 2 years. Eventually Hughes lived again with his mother after she remarried and settled in Cleveland. There he wrote for his high school newspaper and published his first poetry. One of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that "the Negro was in vogue", which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue." In addition to poetry, Hughes wrote plays, and short stories. He also published several non-fiction works. From 1942 to 1962, as the civil rights movement was gaining traction, he wrote an in-depth weekly column in a leading black newspaper, The Chicago Defender. External Website

Films/Videos Mosquito Squadron 1969 Mosquito Squadron is a 1969 British war film made by Oakmont Productions, directed by Boris Sagal and starring David McCallum. The raid echoes Operation Jericho, a combined RAF–Maquis raid which freed French prisoners from Amiens jail in which the Mosquitos took part. David "Scotty" Scott (David Buck) is shot down during a low-level bombing raid on a V-1 launching site. Scott and his navigator/bomb-aimer are believed killed. Following the raid, his wingman and friend, then-Flight Lieutenant (later insignia Royal Canadian Air Force squadron leader) Quint Munroe (David McCallum) comforts Scott's wife, Beth (Suzanne Neve), and a romance soon develops, rekindling one that they had had years earlier. Scotty and Quint were more than comrades; they were brothers in arms, brought together by a shared upbringing after Munroe was orphaned. External Website

Writers Kenneth Grahame 1859-1932 Kenneth Grahame (1859 – 1932) was a British writer. He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, the 3rd of 4 children. In 1864, his mother died after giving birth to the youngest boy, and his father sent the 4 children to live in Berkshire, England, with their maternal grandmother who is described as ‘cold’ and ‘forbidding’. Apart from one brief attempt to live together, Kenneth never saw his father again. Kenneth Grahame is most famous for The Wind in the Willows (1908), one of the classics of children's literature. He also wrote The Reluctant Dragon. Both books were later adapted for stage and film, of which A. A. Milne's Toad of Toad Hall, based on part of The Wind in the Willows, was the first. Other adaptations include the Disney films The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad and The Reluctant Dragon. External Website

Films/Videos Christmas Child 2004 Christmas Child (2004). After his adopted father dies, a mysterious photograph, which may be a clue as to his origins, leads a journalist Jack Davenport (William R. Moses) to a small Texas town at Christmastime. External Website

Actors Charlie Murphy Charles Quinton Murphy (July 12, 1959 – April 12, 2017) was an American actor, comedian, and writer. He was best known as a writer and cast member of the Comedy Central sketch-comedy series Chappelle's Show and as the co-star of the sitcom Black Jesus. He was the older brother of actor and comedian Eddie Murphy. Born and raised in New York, Eddie and Charlie's parents - Lillian and Charles - split up when the boys were little. Charles was murdered by a girlfriend just a few years later. Lillian became ill and the brothers spent a short period in foster care. She then remarried and her husband Vernon Lynch brought Eddie and Charlie up.He talked about experimenting with drugs and having "tons of fights". He once found himself with a gun held to his head in high school after threatening a classmate. According to his 2009 book The Making of a Stand-Up Guy, Murphy received three years probation for robbing a driver at gunpoint, and in the final year of his probation was arrested for larceny, loitering and other misdemeanours. He was then sentenced to serve the rest of his probation - 10 months - in county jail. His mother took him to all the armed services recruitment offices on the day he was released from jail in 1978 and they all turned him down due to his criminal record. The Navy eventually agreed to take him after his mother pleaded: "You gotta take my son or he's going to be killed out here." He served for six years as a boiler technician. He died in 2017 of Leukemia. External Website

Television Shows The Chestnut Man 2021 The Chestnut Man is a 6-part Danish crime thriller which opens with the murder of a family in 1987. There are foster children in the family who are not killed. More than 30 years later, detectives investigate the brutal murder of a young woman whose son is now in the foster care system. As the series proceeds we find out that one man has decided the child protection system is inadequate and he has become a vigilante on behalf of neglected children. External Website

Poets Robert Duncan Robert Duncan American poet, Robert Duncan (1919-1988), was born in Oakland, California. His mother died in childbirth when Robert was born; Robert was subsequently adopted and renamed. Robert Duncan reclaimed his birth name in 1941. Robert Duncan began studying at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1935. There, he continued writing poetry; he’d been encouraged in this by a high school teacher. He left university after 2 years and moved to New York, where he participated in emerging arts scenes, such as American Surrealism. During the 1960s, Duncan achieved success with 3 books: The Opening of the Field (1960), Roots and Branches (1969), and Bending the Bow (1968). Robert Duncan is regarded as one of the most influential of American post-war poets. Much of his work was influenced by his theosophist adoptive parents and by his anarchic politics. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Plot 29: A Love Affair With Land Allan Jenkins 2016 Personal narrative blended with a gardener’s log-book, in Plot 29 Allan Jenkins, the Editor of Observer Food Monthly, organically weaves together memoir and memory from his childhood to the recent past. He discusses his time in foster care and the importance of that to his experience as a gardener in adulthood. External Website

Academic Articles Fremantle: Reflections of a child migrant Michael McCarthy 2016 Michael McCarthy is a former child migrant. In this paper he reflects on his journey as six year old Michael May to Australia, of his time in St Vincent's Foundling Home in Western Australian and of being fostered to Tom and Irene Gollop. Many years later, he met with the woman who left him in a home because her husband was ill and when she returned to fetch him, was told he had been sent to Australia. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir Extraordinary Journey: The Lifelong Path of the Transracial Adoptee Mark Hagland 2021 Transracial adoptee, Mark Hagland, reflects on subjects such as negotiation idendity, being different, interacting with birth culture, and visiting one's country of birth. In this book, he includes the stories of other transractial adoptees from a variety of countries of origin. External Website

Writers Henry Morton Stanley 1841-1904 British explorer, journalist and politician, Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904), was in kinship care, foster care and the workhouse as a child. Henry Morton Stanley was born John Rowlands. He never knew his father, who died shortly after he was born. He was abandoned by his mother, 18-year-old unmarried Elizabeth Parry, almost immediately on his birth and handed over to the care of his grandfather, Moses Parry, who lived in Denbigh, Wales. John was about 6 when his 84-year-old grandfather died in 1847. The boy was taken to live with another couple, Jenny and Richard Price, and his care paid for by two uncles. When the Prices decided the rate was too low, and the uncles declined to pay more or care for the child themselves, John Rowlands was transferred to the St Asaph Union Workhouse. When he was about 15, John left the workhouse and, after being rejected by several relatives, was taken in by a cousin, Moses Owen, a schoolmaster in Brynford. 9 months later, John went to live with his Aunt Mary who introduced him to another aunt, whose partner worked in insurance in Liverpool. The clerkship John Rowlands had hoped for in Liverpool didn’t eventuate, and eventually he signed up as a cabin boy in a ship headed for America. John Rowlands landed in New Orleans in 1859 and became Henry Morton Stanley after he became friendly with a merchant, Henry Hope Stanley. Henry Morton Stanley was a soldier and seaman before he became a journalist. He was sent by the New York Herald in 1869 to find the Scottish explorer, David Livingstone, who hadn’t been heard from since he left for Africa in 1866. Stanley became a celebrity on his return to the States. After Livingstone died in 1873, Stanley decided to continue with exploring Africa. He was financed by the New York Herald and Daily Telegraph in London and left for Lake Victoria in 1874, reporting on his trip in The Congo and the Founding of its Free State (1885). External Website

News - broadcast, print, internet, magazine articles Biden issues 'long overdue' apology for federal Indigenous boarding schools PBS NewsHour 2024 On 26 October 2024 US President Joe Biden formally apologised for the US policy that forcibly separated generations of Native Americans from their families and sent them to boarding schools for the purpose of forced assimilation into white society. “I formally apologise” said Joe Biden, “as President of the United States of America for what we did. I formally apologise. I have a solemn responsibility to be the first President to apologise to Native peoples, Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, Native Alaskans … Frankly, there’s no excuse that this apology took 50 years to make…the Federal Indian Boarding School policy, the pain it has caused, will always be a significant mark of shame, a blot on American history." For more information on what was called the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, see https://www.doi.gov/priorities/strengthening-indian-country/federal-indian-boarding-school-initiative External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience I'll Be Right Here Amy Bloom 2025 I’ll Be Right Here (2025) by American writer Amy Bloom tells the story of a chosen family over decades and across continents. The novel centres on Gazala & Samir Benamar who are French Algerian siblings orphaned in pre-WWII Paris. Samir was adopted as a baby by Gazala’s parents. After WWII, Gazala emigrates to New York. There she meets the Cohen family and becomes part of their family. It’s the Greats or members of the chosen family who gather when Gazala is dying. External Website

Biography of Care Experienced People One Life: My Mother's Story Kate Grenville 2016 This narrative memoir celebrates the life of best-selling and award-winning novelist Kate Grenville's mother. Nance Russell was born in 1912 in country New South Wales to working class parents who worked assiduously to move up the social ladder. As they were doing so, they often left their children with others. Nancy was in kinship care, foster care, and boarding school. She then, at the insistence of her mother, became a pharmacist, swapping that career in life for teaching, the profession she had wanted as a child. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Butcher Boy Patrick McCabe 1992 The Butcher Boy is a 1992 novel by Irish writer, Patrick McCabe. It tells the story of Francis "Francie" Brady who ends up in an 'industrial school' where he is sexually abused by one of the priests. He is also befriended by a gardener. The title comes from Francie's work as a butcher and his dismembering of the body of a woman he murders. The Butcher Boy was adapted into an award winning film in 2007. External Website

Biography of Care Experienced People Charlie Chaplin (biography) Peter Ackroyd 2014 A biography of one of film's most legendary figures, Charlie Chaplin. Charlie Chaplin (1889-1997) had a difficult childhood. Because his father was absent and his mother struggled financially, he was in the infamous English workhouse, and Hanwell Schools for Orphans and Destitute Children. There were some advantages about being in Hanwell - education, warm clothes and food - compared to being at home where mum was struggling with poverty and ill health. But Charlie hated it. He survived by dreaming about becoming a great actor and developing enormous confidence in himself. Chaplin began performing early and began appearing for Keystone Studios in 1914. In 1919, he co-founded United Artists and wrote, produced and directed most of his films, in addition to starring in them. External Website

Films/Videos The Secret Garden 2020 In 1947, orphaned Mary Lennox is sent from her home in India to her uncle in Yorkshire, England. Mary discovers that her cousin, Colin Craven, is bedridden. Seeking the help of her friend, Dicken, Mary persuades Colin to join her in a garden on the estate which has been disused since Colin's mother dies. This proves to be a healthful adventure. The film is based on the 1911 novel of the same name by Frances Hodgson Burnett. External Website

Academic Articles Fostered Voices: Narratives of US Foster Care Nikky Greer 2019 Fostered Voices: Narratives of US Foster Care is a PhD thesis by Nikky R Greer submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board in December 2019. In her study, Nikky Greer has used an anthropological approach to examining the foster care system, including interviews with those involved. She argues that saying the foster care system is “broken” assumes that the system is there to “help and support families and children.” Instead, she shows that what the system is all about is, its “most basic function is to shape, control and reform its subjects into compliant neoliberal citizens”. External Website

Radio & Podcast Adoptees Crossing Lines Adoptees Crossing Lines 2023 Adoptees Crossing Lines is a podcast hosted by 3 women who describe themselves as “angry, healing and honest adoptees”. The podcast includes topics such as ‘Adoptees & Mental Health’, ‘Adoptees as Parents’, ‘Adoptees & Identity’, as well as the origin stories of 2 of the hosts, Lia Epps and Dr Noelle Chaddock. External Website

Television Shows The Tower 2022 The Tower (2021) is a British police procedural adapted from Kate London’s Metropolitan book series. It stars Gemma Whelan as police officer Sarah Collins. In the 2nd series, there is a dangerous man who has been beating up his partner. Mark Brannon (Charley Palmer Rothwell) was in foster care as a child and is aided in evading the police by his friend, who was also in foster care. There is, as well, a less stereotypical story when a ‘posh’ man is charged child sexual abuse and murder. External Website