The New York Times: Away From Home - 'Among the 400,000 foster children in America, teenagers are the hardest to place with families. Then, at 29, she became a foster parent, taking in a former student, a transgender teenager she now considers her daughter.'

Beam, although never a foster child herself, left her emotionally disturbed mother’s house at the age of 14 and never saw her mom again. Salon: 'To the End of June': Stories from foster care - ''To the End of June' is part history and overview, part in-depth portraits of foster children and parents. GuestĬris Beam, author of ' To The End of June: An Intimate Life of American Foster Care.' She teaches creative writing at Columbia University, New York University, and Bayview Correctional Facility.

This hour, On Point: confronting America’s foster care system. “And yet nobody,” she writes, “not the kids, not the foster or biological parents, not the social workers, the administrators, the politicians, the policy experts – thinks the system is working.” That costs nearly 20 billion dollars annually. It's a world that manages about 400,000 children a year. Her exploration was a daunting task, but Beam had a personal investment – she’s a foster mother and she wanted to make sense of the world she was part of. In her new book, 'To The End of June,' author Cris Beam casts a searing eye on the labyrinth that is the American foster care system. We get inside America’s foster care system to see what it’s doing and not doing, for and to the children there. Twitter facebook Email This article is more than 9 years old.

To the End of June by Cris Beam