Jennifer Lauck, author of the New York Times bestseller Blackbird, has joined Terra Communications’ speakers’ bureau. After hosting Jennifer and Blackbird on the Oprah Show, Oprah advised her listeners: “This should have been a Book of the Month book. Read it now!”

Drawing inspiration from her childhood, Jennifer explores loss, the complexity of human existence, and her own experiences with them. Her adoptive parents’ deaths left her homeless in Los Angeles at age ten; she later lost her adoptive brother to suicide when she was 20. Despite it all, Lauck writes with humor and humility about the courage to transcend the worst of losses and the perseverance to keep going.

Foster parenting organizations nationwide use Blackbird to give caregivers inspiration and insight into the struggles of raising parentless children. Lauck has also worked with Yale professors at the New Haven Post Traumatic Stress Center. Previously to writing, Lauck worked as an investigative journalist for ABC affiliates.

Lauck is currently working on a fourth memoir, Familiar Stranger, which deals with her search and reunion with her birth mother. Lauck has also studied Tibetan Buddhism with both H.H the Dalai Lama and H.H. the Karmapa Lama, and achieved the Tibetan foundational meditation standard of Ngondro.