Lori Teresa Yearwood, a journalist who after an excruciating spiral into two years of homelessness returned to reporting and wrote each about her ordeal and about folks coping with comparable financial hardships, died on Sept. 17 at her dwelling in Salt Lake City. She was 57.
Her loss of life, in hospice care, was brought on by ovarian most cancers, stated Sherry Long, a detailed pal.
Ms. Yearwood’s articles for The Washington Post, The New York Times, Slate, Defector, Mother Jones and different shops established her as a outstanding and empathetic voice of the unhoused, as she referred to as homeless folks. She referred to herself as a “trauma-informed journalist.”
“She had the chops of a great reporter with lived experience,” stated David Wallis, the previous government director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, based by the author Barbara Ehrenreich, which supplies grants to journalists like Ms. Yearwood, a few of them on the point of poverty, to put in writing about social inequality for main publications.
“She had a unique voice, and was able to get stories no one else was getting,” Mr. Wallis stated in a cellphone interview.
Before she coated others’ tales, Ms. Yearwood wrote about herself.
“My descent into homelessness felt as though it happened in the blink of an eye,” she wrote in The New York Times in 2021. “It was as if one moment I was standing in a meadow next to my horses, stroking their manes, and the next I was lying inside a plastic bag on a park bench wrapping clothes around my shivering body.”
But the truth is it was a slow-motion fall, one she couldn’t see coming. It took 14 years, and it began along with her choice round 2000 to go away The Miami Herald, the place she had been a reporter for seven years.
With an inheritance from her father, she began a nonprofit group to assist low-income kids write, nevertheless it didn’t make sufficient cash to pay its workers. She moved to Oregon, the place she raised horses. While there, she developed a business making sugar-free treats for horses.
But the financial institution foreclosed on her home in 2008. Then, after residing in a small carpentry shed on her mom’s property for 5 years, she moved to a cottage that burned down two weeks after she moved in. Her mom died. She was evicted from her subsequent residence. She moved right into a lodge in Salt Lake City, however her keep ended when she was unable to pay for her room.
From late 2014 to early 2017, she was out and in of shelters and slept on the road. She was repeatedly sexually assaulted by a person who labored for a homeless outreach middle, the place Ms. Yearwood picked up her every day hygiene package.
“In that other life,” she wrote in a 6,300-word article that appeared on the entrance web page of The Washington Post on Oct. 28, 2018, “I had thought homeless shelters were places of refuge. The Road Home, though, turned out to be an intensified replications of the chaos on the streets — the same desperation, the same violence — concentrated in a single building.”
She was incarcerated for six months for public lewdness after she bathed bare in a river — she stated she couldn’t tolerate cleansing herself in a shelter’s bathe stalls, which have been affected by tampons and used bathroom paper. She was taken to the psychiatric ward of a hospital for “bizarre behavior,” she wrote, which led to diagnoses of bipolar dysfunction and schizoaffective dysfunction, and she or he was forcibly medicated.
The a number of traumas rendered her largely mute; she didn’t inform medical doctors about what had transpired in her life till then.
But she steadily recovered with assist from a pastor on the Salt Lake City Mission and from Journey of Hope, a nonprofit group that helps harmed ladies begin new lives.
“When she came to me, she wouldn’t look up, she was looking at the ground; she couldn’t see because her glasses had been smashed,” stated Shannon Miller-Cox, the founding father of Journey of Hope. “I said, ‘It’s dangerous on the street and women are being brutalized’ and she said, ‘Yes, I’ve been brutalized.’
“I said, ‘A lot of our women are getting assaulted,’ and she said, ‘Yes, I was assaulted.’”
Then, Ms. Miller-Cox recalled by cellphone, Ms. Yearwood informed her, “I used to be a writer.”
“And I said, ‘Honey, you’re going to write again. And you’re going to be powerful.’”
Lori Teresa Yearwood was born on Sept. 22, 1965, in Denver and grew up within the suburbs of Palo Alto, Calif. Her father, Vernon Yearwood-Drayton, was a Panamanian immigrant who labored as a microbiologist at NASA’s Ames Research Center. Her mom, Marlene (Moss) Yearwood, was an administrative assistant at Stanford University.
Lori took ballet classes on the San Francisco Ballet School as a baby and, in 1991, graduated from San Francisco State University with a bachelor’s diploma in journalism. She labored as a reporter for The Fresno Bee, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Syracuse Post-Standard and The Herald. She additionally wrote some articles for Tropic, The Herald’s Sunday journal.
“I remember her as a very promising young writer,” Tom Shroder, Tropic’s former editor, stated in a cellphone interview.
Her expertise re-emerged after her homelessness ended and she or he discovered work. She was employed as a cashier at a Whole Foods Market in Salt Lake City, incomes $11 an hour; as a grant author for Journey of Hope; and as assistant program director at a refugee middle.
Mr. Shroder, who had been following her on Facebook (“My ultimate goal: to once again write full-time,” Ms. Yearwood wrote on July 4, 2018), contacted her.
“I said, ‘You have an amazing story,’” Mr. Shroder stated. “‘You experienced something that people write about with no insight.’”
He launched her to his contacts at The Post, the place he was an editor. The front-page article she wrote led Mr. Wallis to deliver her to the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
In addition to articles about her plight and others’, Ms. Yearwood wrote items through which she beneficial that shelters relieve the fixed fatigue that worsens the trauma of homeless folks with higher residential designs that encourage sleep, and that supported elevated funding in government-subsidized housing.
When she delivered the keynote deal with on the Supportive Housing Conference final yr, she talked about defying assumptions about being homeless.
“When I was living on a slatted wood park bench on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, the projections that people foisted on me were dire,” she stated. “One, they said, ‘You’re going to die.’ Two, they said, ‘You will live the rest of your life in an institution.’”
No quick members of the family survive.
Ms. Yearwood had been engaged on a memoir — Mr. Shroder stated she had written loads of it however didn’t have a writer — and was consulting on a homelessness challenge for the Opinion part of The Times that’s scheduled to be revealed this fall. She had been anticipated to put in writing the challenge’s foreword.
Meeta Agrawal, the particular tasks editor of the Opinion part, wrote in an e-mail that Ms. Yearwood “brought the full power of her brilliant thinking, hard-earned knowledge and deep passion to bear on our ideas, and in doing so she shaped the direction of the project.”
Source: www.nytimes.com