Courtesy Ekere Family
Janie Ekere at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
This is not the news that I wanted to be delivering to you. Janie Ekere, our John Lewis Writing Fellow since May of this year, died last week. She was only 25; her birthday was just a couple of weeks away on December 30th. She passed away peacefully in her sleep. I was aware that Janie had some health issues, but I never would have imagined the call I received from her family over the weekend.
Janie was exactly the type of person those of us in journalism need to welcome into our industry. She was the type of person for whom we created our John Lewis Writing Fellow program. She was born into an immigrant Nigerian family in Greensboro, North Carolina, graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill two years ago this month, and interned with The Daily Yonder, lifting up the struggles of the working poor in rural America, before coming to the Prospect. She had a passion for telling stories about underrepresented and marginalized communities, in part because she lived that experience.
Read Janie’s stories in The American Prospect
Her dozen bylines for the Prospect included stories about how hard it is to run for office without personal wealth; the difficulties of states trying to reform payday lending; the controversy surrounding the Republican gubernatorial candidate in her home state of North Carolina, Mark Robinson; what the election would mean for rural voters; political organizing from unions and environmental activists and faith groups; and what student debtors might face in a second Trump administration. She appeared on our live YouTube show on a couple of occasions and was a poised presence, able to explain policy cleanly and succinctly. Audio reporting was another passion of hers.
Janie was working on a breaking story about North Carolina’s Republican legislature stripping power from Democratic statewide officers when this tragedy struck. In my final communication with her, I asked if she was ready to file before the day was out, and she replied, “Maybe, but I can’t make any guarantees.” She passed away the next day. Unimaginably, she had already scheduled a couple of days off for a funeral for a different family member, so I didn’t think much about not hearing from her, until I got the call from her family.
We are a small organization, and something unspeakable like this has a much greater impact on our family at the Prospect. One of the greatest pleasures of my job is helping develop young writers and watching them grow. For this to happen to someone right at the launching point of her career has completely gutted me.
Our hybrid work environment allows us to widen the talent pool for our staff, drawing from all over the country, from all types of backgrounds and perspectives. This is what allows us to bring aboard people like Janie. The drawback, of course, is that we’re not all in a workspace together, feeding off one another’s knowledge and interests and passions. We try at the Prospect to make sure that we’re developing at least a facsimile of that newsroom environment. But it’s hard, and people get tunnel vision when they don’t see one another every day, myself included. It’s something I regret in this moment.
It pains me to say that I only met Janie one time in person, just a few months ago. She was in Los Angeles for an LGBT journalists’ conference, and she was excited to meet other people early in their careers. We had lunch and talked about reporting, about the confidence you need to be able to tell someone else’s story, the confidence that you can explain politics and policy to an audience and have them understand it. She was just starting to gain that confidence.
In the first essay in his short volume The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates imparts to young journalists the task of “nothing less than doing their part to save the world.” Janie was doing her part: learning the rhythms and meters of journalism, learning how to elevate people in pain and grant them power. I was tragically unaware of how close she was to that pain herself.
Janie’s family has set up a GoFundMe for burial expenses. The Prospect, of course, is donating to this, and if you have the ability to do so, you can as well.
Above all, Janie was a really nice person, eager and diligent and unfailingly polite. One thing I remember so vividly: When we would have one-on-one conversations about stories she was working on, I would usually end the conversation by saying, “Thank you,” and she would respond, “You’re welcome.” I’m sad that I won’t get to hear that little “You’re welcome” again, but I’ll say one more time: Janie, thank you.
