Lori Teresa Yearwood, Journalist of Life on the Edge, Dies at 57

Lori Teresa Yearwood, a journalist who after an excruciating spiral into two years of homelessness returned to reporting and wrote both about her ordeal and about people dealing with similar economic hardships, died on Sept. 17 at her home in Salt Lake City. She was 57.Her death, in hospice care, was caused by ovarian cancer, said Sherry Long, a close friend.Ms. Yearwood’s articles for The Washington Post, The New York Times, Slate, Defector, Mother Jones and other outlets established her as a prominent and empathetic voice of the unhoused, as she called homeless people. She referred to herself as a “trauma-informed journalist.”“She had the chops of a great reporter with lived experience,” said David Wallis, the former executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, founded by the writer Barbara Ehrenreich, which gives grants to journalists like Ms. Yearwood, some of them on the brink of poverty, to write about social inequality for major publications.