Claudia Rowe: 2026 Poverty Studies Distinguished Lecture

Claudia Rowe has been writing about the places where youth and government policy clash for 34 years. She is the recipient of a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism and multiple honors for investigative reporting. Her work has been twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. Claudia has been published in The New York Times, The Seattle Times, Mother Jones, and The Stranger. In 2018, Claudia’s memoir, The Spider and the Fly, won the Washington State Book Award.

In her most recent book, Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care, Rowe’s storytelling is both vivid and unflinching, offering readers a deep understanding of the foster care-to-prison pipeline. Through interviews with psychologists, advocates, judges, and the former foster children themselves, Rowe paints a heartbreaking picture of the lives shaped by this broken system.

By the time Maryanne was 16 years old, she had been arrested for murder. In and out of foster and adoptive homes since age 10, she’d run away, been trafficked and assaulted, and finally pointed a gun at a man and pulled the trigger. She fled, but it didn’t take long for the police to catch up with her.

In court, the defense blamed neither traffickers, nor Maryanne, but Washington state itself―or rather, its foster care system, which parents thousands of children every year. The courts didn’t listen to that argument, but award-winning journalist Claudia Rowe did.

Washington state isn’t alone. Each year, hundreds of thousands of children grow up in America’s $30 billion foster care system, only to leave and enter its prisons, where a quarter of all inmates are former foster youth.

Weaving Maryanne’s story with those of five other foster kids across the country―including an 18-year-old sleeping on the New York City subways; a dropout turned graduate student; and a foster child who is now a policy advisor to the White House―Rowe paints a visceral survival narrative showing exactly where, when, and how the system channels children into locked cells.

Rowe brings her extensive experience and investigative prowess to this eye-opening work.