JJ Pionke

1978 – 2026

JJ Pionke, librarian, library and information studies educator, and advocate for people with disabilities, has died.

JJ was born in suburban Chicago to Wayne and Rita Pionke. JJ loved gatherings of his extended family, which included pierogi assembly lines at Easter, and 4th of July food fights. JJ’s birthday fell within Super Bowl season, and his family threw birthday/football parties to celebrate together. He loved Michigan football and enjoyed weekly calls after the games to discuss the plays with his mother. His time in Japan converted JJ to a life-long fandom of Sumo, and he would stay up into the wee hours to catch live matches on television.

His family were enthusiastic world travelers and JJ embraced the joy of travel throughout his life, visiting Egypt, Malaysia, the U.K., and many destinations across North America. He and his mother shared a love for Washington, D.C. during cherry blossom season. Later, he taught English in Japan, traveled to Ghana and Singapore on Library and Information Science (LIS) professional development trips, and attended many conferences throughout the United States. 

JJ pursued his undergraduate education at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri, graduating with a BA in History in 2000. He completed a Master’s degree in English at Truman State in 2003 and spent most of the next decade working as an adjunct instructor at a variety of local colleges in the Chicago area.

After being encouraged by librarians at one of the colleges where he taught to consider a career in librarianship, he enrolled in the University of Michigan School of Information in 2011 and completed his MLIS in 2013. While Chicagoland was always home for JJ, his heart lived in Ann Arbor and JJ bled maize and blue. His signature Michigan beanie was a feature of many Zoom meetings and virtual teas over the past several years.

JJ began his career in librarianship at Wichita State University in 2013, and relocated to Champaign, Illinois to take a tenure-track job as Applied Health Sciences Librarian and Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois in 2014.

The role of Health Sciences Librarian energized JJ. He rose as a scholar librarian deeply invested in disability justice in the profession. This passion emerged from his own struggles with ableism in the library workplace, and he documented his fight for acceptance and accommodations, fearlessly exposing the hostility this advocacy was met with at the University of Illinois.

Between 2014 and 2023, JJ published more than 25 peer-reviewed journal articles, a dozen book chapters, and contributed to more than $1.2 million dollars in awarded grants. Among many other honors, JJ was recognized with the IACRL People’s Choice Award in Scholarly Publishing (2020), the Medical Library Association Presidents Award (2021), and the Arnold O. Beckman Research Award in 2017, the highest individual research honor awarded by the University of Illinois. He was named a Library Journal Mover and Shaker in 2021.

Despite these accomplishments and his international reputation as a library professional, his colleagues in the University of Illinois Library saw fit to deny JJ tenure and he left the university in 2023. A very brief time at Iowa State University was cut short after university and library administrators were unwilling to support JJ’s accommodations, which effectively ended JJ’s career in academic libraries.

In 2019, JJ returned to the classroom, teaching Accessible Library and Information Services as an adjunct instructor for the Syracuse University School of Information. JJ was a passionate, student-centered educator and he was proud of fostering the values of disability justice in the rising generation of information professionals. He also developed and taught numerous webinars for the American Library Association and other LIS professional organizations, libraries, and consortia in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.

JJ co-founded the journal DisLIS: Disability in Library and Information Studies with other disability advocates, accessibility and UX experts, and disability studies scholars in 2023. While working on DisLIS, JJ developed remarkable skills as an interviewer. A passion for conversation with people he found intellectually stimulating shines through the interviews he published in the journal. Among his interlocutors were his cherished friend, playwright Kate Bornstein, Alice Wong, Maria Sweeney, Margaret Price, Nnedi Okorafor, Travis Chi Wing Lau, Mimi Khúc, and other leading thinkers and creatives in disability justice and graphic medicine (the use of comics for medical education and to tell the stories of people living with illness and disability). An edited collection, Disability Justice in Libraries is under contract with Bloomsbury LIS and will be completed posthumously.

JJ was an avid collector of Legos, stickers, art, handmade textiles and, of course, books. Collections are being established in his name at libraries that focus on LGBTQ+ history and graphic medicine. 

JJ died on September 21, 2026 in Ames, Iowa after being hospitalized for an aggressive infection. JJ was preceded in death by both of his parents. He is survived by his brother Tom, his sister-in-law and a niece and nephew, all of Butte, Montana; his cousins Marge and Eddie, other extended family throughout the Chicago suburbs, and a wide network of friends, collaborators, and colleagues in libraryland.

The JJ Pionke Memorial Foundation was established to support the long term care of his beloved cats, Savil and Aiden, and to establish a scholarship in his name for an LIS student with disabilities. In lieu of flowers or other gifts, please consider supporting these endeavors in JJ’s memory.