Janelle Nanos is a reporter at The Boston Globe, where in 2023, she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature reporting for her decade-long investigation into a woman's allegations of childhood sexual abuse. That story, which also won the Dart Award for Excellence in the Coverage of Trauma, is now the basis of her first book, An Unthinkable Crime.
An Unthinkable Crime, which she worked on during her 2025 MacDowell residency, will be a character-driven narrative that traces the evolution of child sexual exploitation in America from the 1970s to the present, drawing on the stories of victims, law enforcement officers, lawyers, advocates, and psychologists while exposing the systems that perpetuate it, all with an eye toward identifying ways to stop these horrific crimes. Nanos was the recipient of the Society for Features Journalism's narrative storytelling award; the Society of Professional Journalists' Sigma Delta Chi Award for magazine investigative reporting; and the Online Journalism Award for Large Newsroom Feature reporting.
Nanos also teaches journalism at Boston College, where she'll be the Visiting Fellow in Journalism at the university's Institute for Liberal Arts during the 2024-2025 academic year. She lives in Boston with her husband and two children.
