Meet the Adoptees On Team
Haley Radke (by Jill Schindel, 2022)
Our host Haley Radke started the Adoptees On podcast on her own in her basement in 2016, but thanks to many generous Patreon supporters in the Adoptees On community, she’s been able to assemble a fabulous team of freelance contributors to help with the show’s growth, quality, and sustainability.
You can read Haley’s full bio here—but let’s focus on the real MVPs on this page: The Adoptees On Freelance Force!
JADE HENNESS
Jade Henness - Adoptees Off Script Co-Host
Jade Henness (she/her) is a domestic, multiracial adoptee from Oregon. She wears many hats, including racial and adoption literacy educator, community organizer, virtual assistant and local historian.
She is currently collaborating on a quantitative research study looking at the impact of religious narrative of adoption on adoptees. Jade lives in the Portland area with her husband, two kids and their dog, Moxie.
HARRISON MOONEY
Harrison Mooney - Adoptees Off Script Co-Host
Harrison Mooney is a best-selling memoirist, award-winning journalist, public speaker, educator and activist from Canada’s west coast. The son of a Ghanaian immigrant mother, he was adopted at birth by a white, fundamentalist Christian family and raised in the Bible belt of British Columbia.
Harrison’s debut memoir, Invisible Boy, which traces his childhood journey “from white cult to Black consciousness,” was the winner of the 2023 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for nonfiction, and has been shortlisted for two BC & Yukon Book Prizes, as well as the prestigious Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.
Harrison lives in East Vancouver with his family and family dog, Bootsy.
Sullivan summer
Sullivan Summer - Adoptees Off Script Co-Host
Sullivan is a domestic, transracial adoptee raised in rural New Hampshire. After more than 20 years as an attorney and corporate executive, Sullivan is engaged in the most personal work of her life, leaning into her identity as a transracial adoptee to write and advocate in support of the adoptee community. She holds a Poetry certificate from Brooklyn Poets, and presented scholarship on Black, transracial adoptee poetics at the 50th Anniversary Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival at Jackson State University. She has been published in Raising Mothers, with work forthcoming in the Bacopa Literary Review. Her work focuses on themes of adoption, identity, race, politics, U.S. History, and pop culture. She is also a regular contributor to Adoptees Off Script. (You can listen to her story in episode 211.)
Sullivan reads more than 150 books per year across all genres, author demographics, and historical time periods. She knows this because she keeps detailed spreadsheets and pie charts and is not embarrassed about sharing her stats (just ask her). We are so excited to have her expertise as one of our Adoptees On(ly) Book Club Co-Hosts.
Lisette Austin
Lisette Austin - Adoptees On Guest Host (2022)
Lisette Austin is a travel podcaster and former host of the award-winning Globetrotter Lounge Podcast, which interviewed women who found creative ways to travel more. Lisette is also a Black biracial adoptee from a closed domestic adoption who, in the last few years, has reunited with her biological family.
She is currently working on a DNA travel podcast project called Traveling My Roots, where she is traveling to the places her ancestors are from—across North America, over to Europe, and finally to Africa. Along her travels, she plans to explore family stories, Black history, the legacy of slavery, the immigrant experience, the complexities of adoption and being multiracial—and ultimately her own identity. Lisette lives in the Seattle area with her husband and son. Listen to her guest-hosting upcoming episodes of Adoptees On!
Jen Edds
Jen Edds - Podcast & Audio Editor
Jen Edds is our podcast editor extraordinaire. In addition to podcast production work, she co-hosts the Beauty and the Gi podcast, a show about Brazilian Jiu-JItsu, and she also writes songs for her other podcast, The UkuDaily Dispatch.
Jen says she knew nothing about adoption before working with Adoptees On. The experience has opened her eyes, ears, and heart to so many aspects of adoption from the adoptee experience and she says she’s a better human because of it.
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Charlotte Carbone
Charlotte Carbone - Graphic Designer
Charlotte Carbone (she/they) is a designer, illustrator, and researcher. She holds a BDes in Fashion Design and plans to pursue an MDes in Inclusive Design. She has worked in a variety of settings and roles, from start-ups with a five-person team to corporations with five offices.
Charlotte is dedicated to researching and designing solutions that reflect the lived experiences of marginalized people. Empathy is her strongest creative tool; she looks forward to disrupting and evolving design systems for an inclusive, accessible future.
