Join author Mark Daley as he launches his new book, joined in conversation by local author and journalist Dave Price.   Safe: A Memoir of Fatherhood, Foster Care, and the Risks We Take for Family is a candid, unforgettable, and often hilarious memoir of two dads daunting quest for fatherhood.

At nearly forty years old, Mark Daley was at the top of his game––the owner of a booming business, a roster of celebrity clients, and newly married to Jason, the man of his dreams––but Mark yearned for more, a family. At odds with biology, Jason and Mark flirted with surrogacy before ultimately deciding to strive for adoption through the foster care system. Determined to avoid the tragic fate experienced by members of his family, Mark and Jason skipped into fostering with the gleeful naivety of fairytale heroes.

What does it really take to keep a child safe? Mark thought he had the answer, having grown up with foster-adopted cousins and been an advocate for child welfare agencies. But when Logan and Ethan, an adorable infant and a precocious toddler, entered their lives, Mark quickly realized he and Jason were not remotely prepared for the uncertainty and complications of foster parenting— much less the emotional roller-coaster of knowing that for their family to stay together another family had to break apart.

Seven hundred children enter the foster care system in the United States every day, and thousands more live on the brink. Safe offers a deeply personal window into what happens when the universal longing for family crashes up against the unique madness and bureaucracy of a child protection system that often fails to consider the needs of the most vulnerable parties of all—the children themselves.

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Mark Daley takes readers on a suspenseful journey as he and Jason grapple with Logan and Ethan’s potential reunification with their biological family, and learn brutal lessons about sacrifice, acceptance, and healing along the way. Daley’s witty, compassionate voice grabs readers from the first page, as he faces the honest, heartrending, and sometimes sidesplitting challenges of parenting and loving children whose future with him hangs in the balance.

Dave Price is an Edward R. Murrow Award and a national Emmy Award winning political journalist. Reporting from the first-in-the-nation caucus state, Dave has interviewed dozens of national and international political leaders including President Barack Obama, President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. He has also had access to dozens of candidates for federal office as well as governors, top legislators and strategists.

Dave is the go-to political expert when it comes to all things related to Iowa politics and caucuses. He has written for Politico and appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, PBS and numerous other national and international media outlets. Reporting from Des Moines, Iowa, Dave started at WHO-TV in 2001. He hosts the Sunday politics show, The Insiders, and created the Iowa State Fair tradition “Cast Your Kernel” — the unofficial corn kernel-based candidate poll of fair attendees that’s closely watched as a bellwether for popular sentiment. More than 60,000 people took part in the poll during the 2019 state fair.

Dave’s love of storytelling began early when, as a child, he used to pretend to do newscasts with his best friend on a tape recorder. He received his bachelor’s degree in television and radio at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville and his master’s degree in broadcast journalism at the prestigious University of Missouri-Columbia.