For Jeffrey and Corddarryl Williamson-Rose, adoption was an option they were considering months before their wedding. They debated other ways to grow their family, but after getting married in September 2022, they began the adoption process. 

The Williamson-Roses’ adoption journey began with a home study, a procedure where a social worker ensures the parents hoping to adopt are fit to care for and provide for a child. 

After their home study was approved the couple utilized a marketing agency to create a profile book that explained who they were to expectant mothers. The agency sent their book to youth groups, prisons and smaller agencies to begin advertising the two. While this approach gets hopeful parents out there, their profiles are usually competing against multiple other profiles. 

Jeffrey said they had two potential matches with expectant mothers before meeting the birth mother of their daughter Ava in May 2023. Over the course of the next nine months, the Williamson-Roses’ attended doctor appointments and built a relationship with Ava’s birth mom. The two were originally in the delivery room before she was transferred to a different room where doctors performed a C-section. 

“We've developed this amazing relationship with them, with her, with her mother, with her brother, and it has exceeded our family,” Jeffrey said. “We have spent Mother’s Day together. We spent Christmases together, Thanksgiving, half birthdays, Halloween.”

Jeffrey said he acknowledges how the adoption process for him and his husband may be completely different from that of other hopeful parents.

“There are people on their website that have been on there for three to four years,” Jeffrey said. “I remember going on their website and like seeing the same families that were on there after we got on, or even before we got on. So it's been such a blessing that we were able to kind of match and go as quickly as we did.”

The idea for writing a book came to Jeffrey six months before Ava was born. He said he did not originally know what it was going to be about, but when Ava was born and their lives progressed, the book wrote itself. 

“There are a lot of scenarios in the book that we actually lived in real life,” Jeffrey said. “So going on our first cruise together, our first plane ride, she facetimes, you know, all three of her grandmothers, you know, pretty much every day. So we just took real life situations and incorporated it.”

The children's book features art created by the artificial intelligence image generator Midjourney. The couple uploaded reference photos and refined their prompt to ensure the images generated were accurate and in the illustration style they wanted. 

“I was an art major when I went to Elon, so I battled going back and forth, ‘Do I want to kind of create these and use my own talents and stuff,’” Jeffrey said. “In the future I may do that. But, you know, where we are in the world I thought it was really cool to kind of test the limits of technology to see what we were able to create and exactly what we wanted.” 

The book was released on Father’s Day in 2025, and Jeffrey said he and his husband used social media to post illustrations from the book to tease its release. He said the reaction on social media was positive. The two were also featured at an event on Elon’s campus in November. 

The event was hosted by the Gender & LGBTQIA Center and the LGBTQIA Alumni Network. Jeffrey received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Elon. While the Williamson-Roses were planning the marketing of the book, they reached out to alumni resources on campus. 

“I thought that it would be an excellent part to kind of take it back home,” Jeffrey said. “And you know who I am today was made through my four years, well, five years with grad school, it made everything possible, so I felt it was only right to do so.”

Assistant Director for Alumni Engagement La’Tonya Wiley said the planning for the event started in the summer but logistical planning took place during the fall semester. The event featured a conversation with the Williamson-Roses about the adoption process and their book. 

“It was just to support an alumni author and also to bring awareness to the cause of same sex couple adoption, and to provide resources and information for those who may be interested or going through the same experience, and to celebrate the work again of our alumni,” Wiley said. 

Jeffrey said the Belk Library staff provided adoption resources for attendees to interact with. 

In the future, Jeffrey said he and his husband want to create other iterations of the book and bring it to Elon’s campus as well.