Claudia Rowe, WARDS OF THE STATE

About the Book

Award-winning author and journalist Claudia Rowe visits the store to discuss her new book, Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care. Through the stories of six former foster kids, Rowe illustrates exactly where, when, and how the system fails the children that it parents, channeling enormous numbers of them into incarceration and homelessness. With accounts from psychologists, advocates, judges and the former foster children themselves, Wards of the State paves a road to reform by pulling back the curtain on our country’s long-standing foster care-to-Pr*son pipeline and the largely invisible realities faced by kids sitting in classrooms next to your own children.

By the time Maryanne was 16 years old, she had been arrested and charged with M**der. 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 the latest man to take her into his car. She pulled the trigger and fled. But with no family to turn to and few reliable friends, it didn’t take long for the police to catch up with her. In court, the defense blamed neither the traffickers, nor Maryanne, but the state itself—or rather, its foster care system, which parents thousands of children every year. The state of Washington didn’t listen, but reporter Claudia Rowe did.

Washington state isn’t alone, of course. 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.

In Wards of the State, Rowe widens the lens on what at first looks like a true-crime case to scrutinize a national pipeline from foster care into locked cells.

About the Author

Claudia Rowe has been writing about the hallways where kids and government clash for more than 30 years. Her reporting on racially skewed school discipline for The Seattle Times helped to change education laws in Washington State, and her coverage of Latino youth gangs was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Rowe has also written for The New York Times, Mother Jones, and Amazon Original Stories. In 2018, she won the Washington State Book Award for her true crime memoir The Spider and the Fly (Dey Street). She is a member of the editorial board at The Seattle Times, where she writes about foster care, juvenile justice, and public education.

Pre-order your copy of Wards of the State here.

Host or Publisher Elliott Bay Book Company