Larry Kaplow

Larry Kaplow is a senior editor for the States Team on NPR's National Desk, which covers state governments across the country.

Kaplow has been at NPR since 2013, starting as an overnight news editor. He moved to the International Desk in 2014 where he led NPR's coverage of the Middle East for a decade. He won NPR's Newcomer Award and was a part of teams that won an Overseas Press Club Award and an NPR Content Excellence Award.

Prior to joining NPR, Kaplow reported from the Middle East for 12 years. He was the Cox Newspapers' Mideast correspondent from 1997 to 2003, reporting from Jerusalem during the Second Intifada as well as from Egypt, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon. He did reporting stints on the NATO campaign in Kosovo and the toppling of Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

He moved to Baghdad just before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. He covered the invasion, the fall of the regime and continued reporting from Iraq for Cox Newspapers and eventually Newsweek until late 2009. In 2010, he returned to Iraq to help report an episode of This American Life.

He was part of a team that won the top prize from the Military Reporters and Editors Association for stories about failures in the US system for compensating Iraqi war victims.

He was a freelance reporter in Mexico City from 2011 to 2013. He also reported from Guatemala on the efforts to prosecute soldiers responsible for a massacre in the 1980s.

Before reporting abroad, Kaplow worked at The Palm Beach Post and The Bradenton Herald in Florida, covering courts, schools, and state government. He graduated from Duke University and was in the Peace Corps in Guatemala. [Copyright 2025 NPR]