BY KAREN BOSSICK
After deciding not to have a biological child, Ketchum residents Sarah Sentilles and her husband Eric decided to adopt a child via the foster care system. After years of starts and stops and endless navigation of the complexities of the foster care system, they got the phone call they’d been awaiting:
A three-day-old girl named Coco was in immediate need of a foster family.
Sentilles chronicled the venture in her new book “Stranger Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn’t Ours.” And she will share readings from the new book being released by Random House today during a Livestream presentation by The Community Library at 6 p.m. Thursday, May 6.
Sentilles also will talk with the library’s Executive Director Jenny Emery Davidson about what it means to mother not just a vulnerable infant but the birth mother who also loves her.
A love letter to Coco and other children like her, “Stranger Care” asks such questions as: How can we care for and protect one another? How do we ensure a more hopeful future for life on this plant? And, if we’re all related, how might we better live?”
Sentilles a critical theorist and scholar of religion, wrote the book “Draw Your Weapons” about a conscientious objector during World War II and a former prison guard at Abu Ghraib. It won the 2018 PEN Award for Creative Nonfiction. She is the co-founder of the Alliance of Idaho, which works to protect the human rights of immigrant via education, outreach and advocacy.
She will also be among the authors who will be involved in the 2021 Sun Valley Writers Conference in July.
Tune into Thursday’s Livestream at https://livestream.com/comlib