Pamela A. Karanova is an Adult Adoptee, Freelance Writer, Author of Born In The Shadows, Living in The Light: My Adoptee Epiphanies, The Fight of My Life, Former President of Adoptees Connect, Inc, and the Founder of Adoptee Remembrance Day – October 30th. Pamela has been featured on Adoptees On, Religion News Service, Canvas Rebel and Overcoming Odds where she has spoken openly about the adoptee lived experience, systemic issues within adoption, and the importance of truth centered dialogue.
Former Co-founder of the Adoptees for Awareness Grant. Creator/Designer of True-to-Life Greeting Cards at The Real Adoptea Moxie Emporium.
Pamela has been featured on various podcasts and video platforms like, Adoptees On, Who Am I Really?, Adoption Unfiltered, National Association of Adoptees & Parents, and Thriving Adoptees.
Her advocacy and writing have been recognized with the 2019 Angel in Adoption Award from the Indiana Adoptee Network and the 2025 Adoption Vanguard Award from Adoption Knowledge Affiliates.
In August 2026, Pamela launched the first-ever Adoptee Remembrance Day Substack Publication, creating a year-round home for the mission of October 30th and a dedicated space to share the voices and lived experiences of adoptees. The platform centers first-person stories from adoptees who have experienced suicidal ideation or survived suicide attempts, alongside remembrance of adoptees lost to suicide, ensuring these conversations continue long after October 30th has passed. All published stories remain free and accessible to everyone, while paid subscriptions help sustain the platform, support the ongoing work of Adoptee Remembrance Day, and provide honorariums to adoptee contributors because their emotional labor deserves to be valued.
Bold | Courageous | Fierce | Writer | Unruly Adoptee | Truth Seeker | Uncensored
“Before I could release
the weight of my sadness
and pain; I first had
to honor its existence.”
― yung pueblo, Inward
Adoptea – Dishing out authentic, bonafide adoptee realitea one click, article, comment, and post at a time, adding uncensored and unfiltered rants and raves with an occasional impromptu cup of hot tea & virtual chat time with fellow adoptees & subscribers.
Moxie – Moxie describes someone with a fighting spirit. If you’ve got moxie, you’ve got confidence, grit, determination, and nerve. If you’ve got moxie, you have a growth mindset, which means you can’t be stopped by an emotional response to a challenging situation and, ultimately, not by anything. Moxie is a word that means: strength of character. It means courage and spunk.
For more than a decade and a half, Pamela A. Karanova has been a bold and unwavering voice in the adoptee community. Through her website, www.pamelakaranova.com, she has curated hundreds of adoptee centered articles that confront the difficult, layered, and often silenced realities of adoption. Before transitioning to Substack in 2022, her writing has generated more than 312,829 website views, reflecting a global readership seeking honesty, validation, and truth beyond the polished narratives often promoted by the adoption industry.
Pamela’s work centers the lived experiences of adoptees. She addresses the complexities of separation trauma, identity loss, secrecy, failed adoptions, estrangement as an adoptee, mental health struggles, abandonment, and the lifelong impact of being relinquished and reassigned. Her platform exists to elevate adoptee voices, not to soften them. She challenges systems that prioritize comfort over truth and calls attention to the long term consequences that adoptees are too often left to navigate alone.
In recognition of her advocacy, Pamela received the 2019 Angel in Adoption Award from the Indiana Adoptee Network and the 2025 Adoption Vanguard Award from Adoption Knowledge Affiliates. She has also been recognized for creating one of the leading adoptee centered websites, built entirely around amplifying adoptee perspectives and fostering community connection.
Beyond writing, Pamela has invested countless hours developing resources, organizing adoptee spaces, and cultivating lifelong relationships within the adoption constellation worldwide. She is the founder of Adoptee Remembrance Day, observed annually on October 30, honoring adoptees lost to suicide, addiction, deportation, abuse, neglect, and even murder. The day exists to acknowledge the devastating outcomes too often hidden from public view, including adoptees who were promised safety and instead experienced violence, abandonment, displacement from their birth countries, and in some cases, permanent separation through deportation. Adoptee Remembrance Day is honored around the world and it brings visibility to lives that mattered and insists that their stories not be erased or minimized.
In 2026, Pamela began serializing her memoir, Born in the Shadows, Living in the Light: My Adoptee Epiphanies, The Fight of My Life, on Substack through her publication, The Real Adoptea Moxie. Rather than pursuing a traditional publishing route, she chose to release her story chapter by chapter in real time. This decision reflects her commitment to transparency, accessibility, and community engagement. By sharing her memoir in serialized form, she invites readers into the unfolding truth of her life as an adoptee, creating space for dialogue, reflection, and collective reckoning.
Her memoir is not a curated redemption arc. It is an unfiltered examination of what it means to grow up adopted in a system that promises safety and belonging while often ignoring the emotional and psychological cost of separation. Through each chapter, Pamela dissects the myths surrounding adoption and explores the deeper question: what happens when the narrative of rescue does not match lived reality?
Pamela shares her story not for sympathy, but for clarity. She writes to ensure that adoptees who feel confused, angry, disconnected, estranged, or unseen understand that their reactions are not defects. They are responses to a profound rupture. Her work continues to push conversations upstream, a philosophy grounded in her favorite quote by Desmond Tutu: “We need to stop pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”
Pamela often adds that, for adoptees, sometimes we are not pulled out at all. Most of the time we are left to drown in the river, and if anyone is pulling us out, it is ourselves. This belief sits at the center of her advocacy. Rather than managing symptoms or offering surface level solutions, she calls for examining the root causes of adoptee overrepresentation in treatment facilities, addiction recovery, homelessness, incarceration, and other systems of crisis. She urges society to confront the systemic foundations of separation, secrecy, and commodification rather than simply responding after the damage is done.
At the heart of Pamela’s work is a commitment to truth telling, community building, and ensuring that adoptee voices are not an afterthought in conversations about adoption. Through her writing, advocacy, Adoptee Remembrance Day, and serialized memoir with over 3000 followers on her Substack, she continues to create spaces where adoptees can see themselves reflected honestly and without apology.
Introducing the True to Life Greeting Card Line by Pamela A. Karanova at The Real Adoptea Moxie Emporium
Pamela A. Karanova created the True to Life Greeting Card Line out of a shared frustration many adoptees know well: the struggle to find a greeting card that actually says what needs to be said. Human experiences are complex. Adoption related experiences are layered, paradoxical, and often difficult to articulate. Many adoptees and those connected to adoption know what it feels like to carry emotions that cannot easily be reduced to Hallmark language.
Each item designed at The Real Adoptea Moxie Emporium is meant to be a bold and unapologetic statement. Every true to life greeting card tells a story. These cards are not surface level sentiments. They are reflections of lived experience.
This is the first true to life greeting card collection created by an adoptee for adoptees, late discovery adoptees, DNA surprises, NPEs, MPEs, Search Angels, donor conceived individuals, and others navigating identity and origin stories. The collection was built to acknowledge the realities that are often overlooked, minimized, or misunderstood.
The designs are dynamic and vivid, intentionally created to stand out. These cards are unforgettable and are meant to spark dialogue and heartfelt conversations. They do not whisper. They say what many people have been thinking but could not find in print.
Understanding is love. Not every card will fit every journey, and that is intentional. One person’s truth may not be another’s, but that does not make it less valid. Humor is also woven into this project. Without humor, everything can feel unbearably heavy. There is no censoring here. Some cards are raw. Some may feel blunt or even rude. Those who are easily offended may find this collection is not for them.
This is only the beginning. The collection will continue to grow. Customized greeting cards are also available for those seeking something designed specifically for their unique situation. Inquiries, pricing, and submission guidelines are available through the contact page.
Subscribers can join the email list to stay updated on new releases, discounts, specials, and sales. All True to Life Greeting Cards are created and designed by Pamela A. Karanova. Readers are encouraged to follow her Substack to learn more about her writing and advocacy work.
The Adoptees for Awareness Grant:
Two Adoptees: A Passionate Collaboration Impacting Many.
When two adoptees gather together to collaborate and make changes for the advancement of the adoptee community, mountains will be moved, and miracles will happen.
We are introducing the Adoptees for Awareness Grant established in 2023. This grant is sponsored by Jeffrey Leventhal of S12F, who partnered with Pamela A. Karanova of Adoptees Connect, Inc.®, both adoptees. This collaboration has been developed to create an influential lifeline to help stimulate more resources and healing for the adoptee community that has otherwise been nonexistent.
About the Adoptees for Awareness Grant:
S12F and Adoptees Connect, Inc. have co-created a grant program to help adoptee-focused 501(c)(3) organizations. The purpose of this program is to help non-profit adoptee centric organizations, created by adoptees and exclusively designed to help adoptees. We will also consider family preservation organizations that keep mothers and babies together or raise awareness of the harm of adoption in general. Our grants are for United States-based 501(c)(3) organizations.
As of 2026, our grant partnership has concluded, but the love given during this project expanded around the world. Thank you, Jeffrey for an amazing partnership! I will be eternally grateful.
Recipients of the Adoptees for Awareness Grant
Here are some of the writing pieces I’m the proudest of:
Adoption: Mislabeled, Medicated, & Diagnosed Adoptees Could Be Grieving Profoundly.
100 Heartfelt Transracial Adoptee Quotes that Honor the Truth of Adoption – 100 Transracial Adoptees come together to share feelings on how adoption has impacted them.
Adoptees, Why Are You So Angry? – Adoptees share feelings on why they are angry.
Why Do Adoptees Search? An Adoptee Collaboration – Many adoptees experience why they choose to search for biological families.
100 Heartfelt Adoptee Quotes that Honor the Truth of Adoption – 100 Adoptees come together to share heartfelt feelings on how adoption has made them feel.
My Friend Has an Adopted Child, and They Don’t Have Any Issues with Being Adopted – Shining a light on the comment so many adoptees hear over and over.
Here are some of the articles I have been featured in:
These Adoptees Refuse to Be Christian Pro-Life Poster Kids by Kathryn Post of Religious News Service.
Toward Preventing Adoption- Related Suicide by Mirah Riben.
Before a month celebrating adoption, a day to recognize adoptees’ trauma by Religion News Service.
Bringing Adult Adoptee Issues to Light by Angela Burton of Next Avenue.
Adoptee Remembrance Day 