Poverty Studies Distinguished Lecture Series

The Poverty Studies Distinguished Lecture

The annual Poverty Studies Distinguished Lecture features leading researchers and writers in the interdisciplinary field of poverty studies.

2026 | Claudia Rowe, author of Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care

Date: April 21, 2026
Time: 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Location: Geddes Hall, Andrews Auditorium
Plan to attend!

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.

2025 | Andrea Elliott, author of Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City

Andrea Elliott is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has documented the lives of poor Americans, Muslim immigrants and other people on the margins of power. She is an investigative reporter for The New York Times and the author of Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City, which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.

Invisible Child follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani Coates, a child with an imagination as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn homeless shelter. Born at the turn of a new century, Dasani is named for the bottled water that comes to symbolize Brooklyn’s gentrification and the shared aspirations of a divided city. As Dasani grows up, moving with her tight-knit family from shelter to shelter, this story goes back to trace the passage of Dasani’s ancestors from slavery to the Great Migration north. By the time Dasani comes of age, New York City’s homeless crisis is exploding as the chasm deepens between rich and poor. In the shadows of this new Gilded Age, Dasani must lead her seven siblings through a thicket of problems: hunger, parental drug addiction, violence, housing instability, segregated schools, and the constant monitoring of the child-protection system. When, at age thirteen, Dasani enrolls at a boarding school in Pennsylvania, her loyalties are tested like never before. As she learns to “code switch” between the culture she left behind and the norms of her new town, Dasani starts to feel like a stranger in both places. Ultimately, she faces an impossible question: What if leaving poverty means abandoning the family you love?

2024 | Poverty, by America: An Evening with Matthew Desmond

Matthew Desmond is a professor of sociology at Princeton University. He is the author of four books, including Poverty, By America and Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), which won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, Carnegie Medal, and PEN / John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. The principal investigator of The Eviction Lab, Desmond’s research focuses on poverty in America, city life, housing insecurity, public policy, racial inequality, and ethnography. He is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, and the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award. A contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, Desmond was listed in 2016 among the Politico 50, as one of “fifty people across the country who are most influencing the national political debate.”