**Available for Pre-order - release date October 6, 2026**
A raw and searching debut that chronicles coming of age as a transracial adoptee. A necessary addition to the modern canon of literary memoirs that explore race, identity, and belonging.
Erik Mohn was raised to believe that love was enough. America taught him otherwise. Born to a Black mother he never knew and adopted by a white family in small-town Massachusetts, Mohn grew up cherished yet unprepared for what his skin would mean in the world.
Stranger in My Own Story traces Mohn’s coming of age as he searches not just for identity but for language—words for grief, for anger, for belonging, for the silence left by a mother he lost and a father he could never quite reach. He pieces together meaning from what’s available and hip-hop becomes his first mirror and his first vocabulary—a survival guide passed through speakers and headphones.
As the cost of his cultural displacement begins to surface, Mohn is forced to confront the wounds he’s been carrying. Those reckonings come to a head at Howard University—where the self he assembled in isolation is tested in community, challenged in relationship, and slowly transformed.
Written with the lyrical pulse of hip-hop and a moral clarity forged in lived experience, Stranger in My Own Story is an intimate memoir of transracial adoption and a universal story about what it costs to grow up without a mirror—and what it takes to build one anyway. Mohn's story is a reflection of the nation's: unfinished, fragile, and still reaching toward wholeness.
Prologue
1: My Brother’s Keeper
2: Meet the Dreamers
3: Show and Tell
4: Crown
5: Men in Black
6: The Sound That Found Me
7: Raised by the Radio
8: The Black List
9: F.U.B.U.
10: Colorblind
11: Blackout
12: Damage Control
13: More Than an Athlete
14: Shut Up and Dribble
15: Wildfire
16: Blues for Nobody’s Child
17: Borrowed Fathers
18: Initiation
19: Oxygen
20: Chasing Sex
21: The Family
22: Freedom School
23: Get Your Hand Out My Pocket!
24: The Third Rail
25: Higher Learning
26: Sabotage
27: Fu*k the Police
28: The Bridge
29: The Mecca
30: HU You Know
31: Armored Heart
32: Dear Mama
33: Higher Ground
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Discussion Questions
Reading List
Chapter 1: My Brother’s Keeper
I was sprinting across the Serendipity Preschool playground like I owned it. Zigging. Zagging. Laughing. Feet barely touching the mulch.
Then I stopped. Cold.
It was one of the first days of school, and chaos ruled the yard. A wild game of tag had broken out, kids shrieking and darting like pinballs in every direction. I’d just jumped in.
Then something caught my eye. Not something. Someone.
I froze, mouth slightly open. Who is that?
“Erik, runnn!” one of my friends shouted, darting past. But I didn’t move. Couldn’t.
All I could see was him—a kid I’d never seen before, sitting calmly in the sandbox. And he looked just like me.
That never happened. Black people didn’t exist in Harvard, Massachusetts. Not at Serendipity. Not in my family. Not in my world.
At four, I didn’t know I was Black. But I knew I was different. I was the contrast in every photo, the glitch in the color scheme.
The only other Black guy I’d ever seen was LeVar Burton on Reading Rainbow—but he was a guy who lived in the TV. Flat, framed, fictional. This kid? He was real. In the flesh. Sitting there in the sandbox like it was nothing.
And he looked like family.
He was shorter. A little rounder. But the skin? Same glow. Mine caramel, his deep mocha. Different shades, different flavors, same recipe.
The hair? Same kinky mini-fro, flattened in all the places nap time left behind. The same soft resistance to fingers, brushes, and assimilation. The kind of hair you can’t pretend away.
Where did he come from?
Where did we come from?
Is he my brother?
Why didn’t my parents tell me I had a brother?
I started drifting toward him, heart pounding, game forgotten. The pull was magnetic. I had to know him.
Far off, a kid yelled, “Erik! You’re out of bounds! That’s not fair!”
I didn’t care. Winning didn’t matter. He did. I kept inching closer.
My journey across the playground felt endless.
The world narrowed to a tunnel: me on one end, him on the other.
All I could hear was my breath: In. Out. In. Out. A drumbeat against the breeze. My palms were slick with sweat, my chest tight.
When I finally reached the edge of the sandbox, I froze.
He was close enough to touch. Real. Breathing. Here.
He didn’t look up, just kept shoveling sand into an orange bucket, slow and deliberate, a tiny king building something sacred. Other kids were nearby, sculpting castles, stomping turrets, digging moats. But he was in his own universe.
“Hi!” I blurted.
He paused. Lifted his head—slow.
“Hi,” he said, squinting.
I stared. Up close, he didn’t look that much like me. But something inside me still whispered: He has to be my brother.
My stomach twisted. Why was I so nervous?
“Uh . . .” I stammered. “I like your castle.”
He tilted his head, curious. “Wanna help me?”
An invite.
“Sure,” I said, slipping into the sand beside him. The tightness inside me unspooled.
“I’m Erik,” I added, grabbing a shovel.
“Hi,” he said again. “I’m Miles.”
We fell into a rhythm. Shovel. Pour. Pat. Repeat. The soft scrape of plastic. The crunch of sand beneath our knees. A burgeoning bond—the kind you build before words learn to carry their own gravity. After a while, I asked, “How old are you?”
“Three,” he said. Shy but steady. “How old are you?”
“Four,” I replied, sitting up straighter like it mattered. Maybe I could look out for him. Be his big brother. His protector.
Still, the question gnawed at me, chewed the edges of my curiosity until I couldn’t hold it in. And then the words tumbled out:
“You know what I think?” My voice came out smaller than I meant it to.
Miles looked up at me, squinting through the sun.
I swallowed hard. “I think we’re brothers.”
The words hung there, suspended. For a second, he didn’t move.
Then his face broke open with a wide grin full of sunlight, the kind of smile that rewrites your whole world in an instant.
“I think so too!” he said.
My chest flooded with a warm relief and with something I didn’t have a name for yet.
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