In mid-November, I found myself standing inside a glowing cube in Hollywood.

Not metaphorically. Literally. Emerson College’s West Coast micro-campus is a futuristic beacon rising from the heart of the entertainment capital, housing the ambitions of 200+ students who are learning to write, produce, act and report on the stories that will shape our culture. And on this particular night, the stories we were making space for were the ones so often pushed to the margins in the realm of entertainment: adoption, identity, belonging.

Next to me sat Marissa Jo Cerar. Screenwriter. Storyteller. She’s the force behind Hulu’s Black Cake and ABC’s Women of the Movement, a writer who cut her teeth on The Handmaid’s Tale, The Fosters, and Birthright. Her mantle holds an NAACP Image Award and two Humanitas Prizes—accolades that matter, yes, but what matters more is this: Marissa writes adoption like she knows it. Because she does. Her work doesn’t tiptoe around identity; it bleeds it onto the page, unapologetically, relentlessly.

Our guide for the evening was Juliet Rubin Ramirez, Emerson alum, CFO of the Adoptee Mentoring Society and fellow transracial adoptee, whose voice carried the quiet authority of someone who’s lived these questions, not just asked them.

Marissa peeled back the curtain on her adaptation of Charmaine Wilkerson’s novel, Black Cake, revealing how—with Wilkerson’s trust and blessing—she rewrote scenes to honor what adoption actually feels like, not what people want it to feel like. I shared my own small adoptee win: educating the writers of This Is Us about Ghost Kingdom’s, which led to Randall discussing his own in Season 5, Episode 13. We’ve both attempted to hold up a mirror for adoptees who rarely see themselves reflected back.

We didn’t shy away from the hard parts. We talked about scarcity—the belief that there’s only room for one adoptee story, one adoptee voice, as if our experiences were a zero-sum game. I unpacked Marika Lindholm’s concept of Boundary Spanning, the skill adoptees develop when we’re constantly translating between worlds that don’t quite fit us. And we named the impossible burden: the expectation that any one of us could stand in for all of us, that our singular stories should somehow contain the multitudes.

By the time the evening wound down, the air had softened. Laughter threaded through the crowd. Pens scratched across title pages—Marissa signing her daughter’s book, Spanky and His Blanky, while I signed copies of You Should Be Grateful: Stories of Race, Identity and Transracial Adoption.

It was a lovely gathering centered on truth, artistry, and the adoptee imprint on our cultural imagination.

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