On the latest episode of the Nieman Storyboard podcast, journalist Claudia Rowe joins Storyboard Editor Mark Armstrong to discuss her most recent book, “Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care,” which has been named a finalist for the 2025 National Book Awards. “Wards of the State” is a narrative nonfiction book told through the stories of six former foster kids to examine the failures of the American foster care system.
When Rowe began the book project, she set out to investigate the question: “Why are so many kids getting locked up [following] foster care, which is supposed to be saving them?” She recalls that the project was inspired by the story of Maryanne, one of the main characters in “Wards of the State,” who was sentenced to 19 years for murdering a man when she was 16 years old. Rowe sat in on Maryanne’s sentencing and was “intrigued by the argument that this teenage girl's defense team was attempting to make that the foster care system was largely to blame for what she had done.”
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Rowe says this was the genesis of the book. “The data said that 59 percent of kids who age out of the system at 18 will have been locked up somewhere, somehow, by the time they're 26. … I began to wonder if the system really was doing something to encourage or even create these outcomes, just as this defense team was arguing.”
In “Wards of the State,” Claudia Rowe includes the stories and experiences of former foster care youth, as well as those involved in the system, such as a New Orleans judge named Ernestine Gray, social workers, therapists, and activists.
Rowe also shares insights on how to work with young people in telling their stories, especially when they've experienced trauma; how to show up as a human first while still being clear about the role of a journalist; and how to navigate a foster care system that makes it difficult to access public information.
Rowe has been writing about youth issues and government policy for more than three decades. She is the recipient of a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism and multiple honors for investigative reporting. Her work has been nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize, and she has published in The New York Times, The Seattle Times, Mother Jones, and The Stranger. In 2018, Rowe’s memoir, “The Spider and the Fly,” won the Washington State Book Award.
The excerpts below are edited for length and clarity.
On developing the idea for ‘Wards of the State’:
The data said that 59 percent of kids who age out of the system at 18 will have been locked up somewhere, somehow, by the time they're 26. This just blew my mind, because this is a system we say is better than where they came from, and this is the result. That kind of clanged in my head as I was watching this girl being sentenced in Seattle for murder.
My idea from the beginning was to tell this story as much as possible through the eyes of young people experiencing it. I really wanted to understand, What does it feel like to be on the street when you're 15 years old? It's 2 o'clock in the morning … it might be really exciting, scary, lonely. I really wanted to understand how kids understood themselves, how they saw what was happening to them. That is a very difficult thing. Few 15-year-olds can really articulate it — certainly not younger children, right? It's really, really hard for kids to have that perspective on their experience. Also, because what I was looking at was: What happens in foster care to older kids so that when they get out, they're immediately locked up? What is going on there? So it began to make more and more sense to talk with people who were former foster youth.
On reporting and structuring the book:
I moved pieces around for a long time. The difficult parts of the book for me were structure and voice. What exactly was my narrator voice? If I want the kids to be telling their story, where is that narrator persona? This is difficult. But I think essentially what happened is I ended up structuring the book kind of the way I discovered the answers for the questions I was trying to find. The book, I think, is very much structured like following a thread or little breadcrumbs, or you could say, sort of unraveling a mystery. I had questions, and I'm assuming the reader will have the same questions, and here is me trying to figure them out. And that was where I kind of got the narrator persona.
I'm just going to be, “Okay, I'm not the genius reporter who knows everything. I'm trying to figure this out just like anybody is.” And that [means] maybe I don't look smart on every page. Maybe a reader goes, “Didn't you know that? Why wouldn't you know that? You're a reporter.” Um, well, no, I didn't know it. We're not magic and we only know what we know by figuring it out. And so the figuring out is going to be part of this story, and it is. So that ended up providing me some kind of narrative scaffolding. Okay, I am figuring out this mystery. It sounds really simple, but it took me a really long time to surrender to that.
On honesty and transparency in narrative nonfiction:
This is not a memoir; this is narrative nonfiction. But I also think it's really, really important to be honest, to be transparent with the reader. And I don't think it is honest to portray a narrative in a vacuum as if these people just exist and they're not talking to someone. They are talking to someone — the interviewer — me. And I am uncomfortable with a sort of artifice that pretends they just landed there in a vacuum.
On the response to ‘Wards of the State’:
I will say that I wrote the book for a general reader who doesn't know anything about the system. I wrote it for the average person who might've heard about foster care, but has no idea about this prison overlap or how it happens or anything. So I really wanted to write a compelling, suspenseful, factual, powerful narrative.
That was my first goal, frankly. So now when I'm hearing so much from people who either work in or somehow touch the system and are really feeling like, “Yes, this is what I see, this is my experience, this is what I know,” and I'm hearing this so much all the time from people across the country who are saying this is reflecting what they know. So that is fantastic. It's a boon that I didn't expect. I wasn't going for that, but that is what's coming back for me. So that's great.
For the subjects, it is varied. I'll say that those who are in better places in their lives now, they are totally into it, fully embraced it, feel like it's really doing something. It's telling their story. I think for those who are in more precarious positions, it's a struggle. It's — like I said — it's hard to see yourself on a page. It hurts.
It is a very weird experience [to] be written about, to see yourself on a page. It's a weird experience for me, let alone somebody in foster care. It's a bizarre experience, and especially if you're exposing sort of the most precarious, frightening, vulnerable parts of your life.
Rowe’s advice on writing about the foster care system and embarking on a book project:
If you have the time and the bandwidth to do a longer, deeper dive, a longer project like a book, I would say take your time. … Listen keenly. Listen when the subject's story seems to be veering in a direction you didn't think it would go, and you maybe don't want it to go. You think that you know what your story is, and you want them to speak to this, but they go over here to some other place entirely. Let it happen. It's a difficult thing to do. It requires relinquishing control, and you need to let it happen because you might find a kernel of magic there. Surprise is magic in journalism, right? Surprise is the glittering stone at your feet that you didn't expect to see. That might be your lede, a fantastic theme, an idea you hadn't thought of. Let the subjects show you something that you didn't presuppose.
Reading List: Authors, Stories, and Books Mentioned
- “Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care” (Claudia Rowe, 2025)
- “Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City” (Andrea Elliott, 2022)
- “The Spider and the Fly” (Claudia Rowe, 2018)
- “Time Out” (Claudia Rowe, 2018)
Show Credits
Hosted and produced by Mark Armstrong
Associate producer: Marina Leigh
Episode editor: Kelly Araja
Audience editor: Adriana Lacy
Promotional support: Ellen Tuttle
Operational support: Paul Plutnicki, Peter Canova
Nieman Foundation interim curator: Henry Chu
Music: “Golden Grass,” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue)
Cover design by Adriana Lacy
Nieman Storyboard is presented by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.
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