For 34 years, Claudia Rowe has been interrogating the experience of youth on the margins through journalism, narrative nonfiction, and memoir. 

Her investigative reporting has received numerous awards, including the Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism and honors from the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. From her first reporting job in the Bronx, NY, to later work for The New York Times, Claudia has approached journalism as means for learning essential elements of literary craft — structure, pace and tone.  

Claudia’s literary work includes Time Out, a 2018 work of narrative journalism commissioned by Amazon Original Stories about a 13-year-old boy sentenced to 23 years in the adult prison system. Her true-crime memoir, The Spider and the Fly (Dey Street) was published the same year and won the Washington State Book Award. 

Claudia’s most recent book, Wards of the State: the Long Shadow of American Foster Care (Abrams), was a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award in Nonfiction.