JJ Pionke

JJ Pionke was an American librarian, library and information studies educator, and disability justice advocate whose scholarship and teaching pressed academic libraries to treat accessibility as a core professional duty rather than a compliance afterthought. Born in 1978 in the Chicago suburbs, he spent much of his career documenting how libraries serve (and sometimes fail) people with disabilities, including library workers themselves.

After a Bachelor of Arts in history (2000) and a Master of Arts in English (2003) at Truman State University, he taught as an adjunct instructor at colleges around Chicago for about a decade. Librarians at one of those schools encouraged him toward the profession. He completed a Master of Science in Information at the University of Michigan in 2013, then began library work at Wichita State University before joining the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2014 as Applied Health Sciences Librarian and assistant professor.

At Illinois he made accessibility tangible: research guides on chronic illness, limb difference and other disabilities that other libraries adapted; physical fixes such as handrails and clearer signage; and a body of peer-reviewed writing on holistic accessibility for patrons and employees. A 2016 ALA Carnegie-Whitney Grant supported more than twenty LibGuides. He received the University of Illinois Arnold O. Beckman Research Award (2017), the Illinois Library Association Crosman Memorial Award (2019), recognition as a Library Journal Mover and Shaker (2020 Advocates class), an IACRL People's Choice Award in Scholarly Publishing (2020), and the Medical Library Association Presidents Award (2021). From 2019 he also taught Accessible Library and Information Services as an adjunct for Syracuse University's iSchool.

His own fight for workplace accommodations, including writing about seeking support for PTSD, shaped a blunt public record of ableism in library workplaces. Despite an international reputation and substantial grant and publication output, he was denied tenure at Illinois and left in 2023. A short period at Iowa State University ended when, according to the memorial published by the JJ Pionke Memorial Foundation, administrators would not support needed accommodations, effectively ending his career in academic libraries. In 2023 he co-founded the open-access journal DisLIS: Disability in Library and Information Studies, developing a distinctive interview practice with disability scholars and artists. An edited collection, Disability Justice in Libraries, remained under contract with Bloomsbury to be completed after his death.

Pionke died on 21 September 2026 in Ames, Iowa, after hospitalization for an aggressive infection. He was in his late forties. He was predeceased by his parents and is survived by his brother Tom and family in Montana, extended family in the Chicago suburbs, and a wide network of colleagues. Friends established a memorial foundation to care for his cats and to fund a scholarship for an LIS student with disabilities.