Janie Imaobong Ekere

Janie I Ekere passed away on December 10,2024 . A Celebration of Lif will be held on January 11, 2025 at Regional Memorial Cremation ,1026 E. Lindsay St, Greensboro NC 27405.Burial at Proximity Mills Cemetery , 2009 Phillips Ave, Greensboro , NC 27405. Visitation 12:00 Noon-12:30    Service will start at 12:30pm.   

Best of 2024: Janie Ekere

Before her tragic passing, our writing fellow focused on rural Americans, marginalized communities, and the swing state she called home.

Prospect Staff

Janie Ekere passed away suddenly in mid-December. It was a shock to all of us at the Prospect who got to know her. She only got to spend about half a year with the organization. But in that time, she was able to contribute work that showed her core interests of uplifting people on the outskirts of society and giving them a voice.

The Hardships of a Working-Class Candidate

Congressional leaders prefer a candidate who can fund themselves or have a fat rolodex of friends who can do so. Working-class candidates face an uphill battle to get legitimized by the establishment. We saw in the election how that strips authenticity from the party that sees itself as working for the people.

A Continuing Struggle to Reform Payday Lending

Rhode Island has tried for 15 years to lower the interest rate on payday loans, without success. Janie covered yet another failed attempt in this deep-blue state this year.

Mark Robinson: A Product of the Republican Controversy Pipeline

As the overlapping controversies of North Carolina’s losing gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson consumed him, Janie looked at how this person rose to prominence in the first place: by delivering a viral comment at a local city council meeting in her hometown of Greensboro. This lack of friction for rising through the ranks of the Republican Party puts people like Robinson in positions of power.

Rural America’s Project 2025 Problem

There weren’t many stories about the stakes of the 2024 election that laid out the challenges for rural America. Janie had the foresight to recognize that rural does not equal agriculture, writing here about climate impacts, food and medical deserts, and more.

SEIU Works the South

Organizing for the election in North Carolina dovetailed with organizing workplaces to finally make inroads in the south, particularly at retail businesses. That work will need to go on in the coming years if unions are to return to relevance.

Student Debtors Could See Hopes Vanish Under Trump

Discussions of student debt in the last four years often focused on the mass debt relief that Joe Biden attempted to provide. But it ignores how Biden fixed longstanding programs, where borrowers were promised debt relief if they opted for public service or were defrauded by their colleges. That’s the bigger risk from a Trump administration, that he will renege on those promises.

Making Room Under the Bus

Janie worked with another writing fellow, Emma Janssen, on this piece about transgender issues and the post-election period. As Emma explains, “Janie and I knew that we wanted to add our voices to the conversation about queer rights that had emerged in noxious ways after Harris lost the election, and this is how we did it. Like so many of the pieces Janie wrote, this story takes a stance on the side of the most marginalized, even when mainstream voices villainize and ignore them.

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.

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.

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David Dayen

Executive Editor

The American Prospect

323.251.9015

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