Maria Adeline Okonkwo passed away peacefully at her West Seattle home on the evening of Monday, May 4, 2026, at the age of sixty-three, surrounded by her partner Tessa, her children Aisha and Kayode, and the early Seattle dusk through the window beside her bed.
Maria was born September 14, 1962, in Lagos, Nigeria, to Adaeze and Chinedu Okonkwo. The family emigrated to Seattle in 1968, settling in the Central District. She attended Garfield High School (class of 1980) and the University of Washington, graduating in 1984 with a degree in journalism.
She joined Crosscut in 1992 as a staff writer and rose to senior editor by 2003, a role she held for twenty-two years. She covered Seattle politics, civic life, and the Pacific Northwest's intersecting environmental and tribal stories with what colleagues described as "the calmest unflinching eye in the newsroom." She also contributed regularly to Seattle Magazine, The Stranger, and the New York Times Sunday opinion section.
She met Tessa Greenwood at a 2002 community meeting about the Eastlake-South-Lake-Union rezoning. They had their commitment ceremony in their Beacon Hill backyard on a clear day in June 2003 and were legally married in 2014, the morning after Washington recognized the right. They raised two children — Aisha, now twenty-one, a senior at Reed College, and Kayode, now eighteen, a freshman at the University of Oregon.
Maria cared deeply about literacy programs in Seattle's public schools, served on the board of the Seattle Public Library Foundation from 2014 to 2022, and gave more reading-program volunteer hours than she ever told her family about. She loved Pike Place Market, where she went almost every Saturday with her grandchildren in the last few years. She loved the Mariners (with grim honesty about their record). She loved Octavia Butler's books with a religious fervor and made all of her colleagues read them.
In the last year, after her diagnosis, she wrote one final long-form essay for Crosscut, on Pacific Northwest journalism in the age of platform collapse, published April 14, 2026. She finished editing it three weeks before her death.
Her partner of twenty-three years, Tessa Greenwood (Seattle); her children Aisha Okonkwo-Greenwood (Portland) and Kayode Okonkwo-Greenwood (Eugene); her three siblings Adaobi (London), Ifeanyi (Houston), and Ngozi (Lagos); and her two grandchildren via Aisha's wife Lily — Henry (5) and Ada (3). She was preceded in death by her parents Adaeze and Chinedu Okonkwo.
The memorial service will be held Saturday, May 17, 2026, at 2:00 PM at the Marker chapel, 2114 Western Avenue, Seattle. The service will be officiated by the Rev. Dr. Angela Wei of University Temple. The chancel reading will be from Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. Music by the Northwest Choral Collective.
The service will be live-streamed for distant family members; the link will be posted to this page on the morning of May 17.
An at-home gathering will follow the service at the family's West Seattle home (private — please contact Tessa for the address if you'd like to attend).
The family requests that memorial donations be directed to Black Lives Matter Seattle-King County, the Seattle Public Library Foundation's literacy programs, or the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Fund at the Carl Brandon Society.
If Maria touched your life, the family would be honored to read your note.