Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki didn’t do the things author Erin Cairns accused in the opening line of her report published October 25:
I am reporting Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki for unethical practices. He submitted a story entirely written by me into a Black voices magazine without my name on the byline….
In fact, Cairns’ name was on the byline. File 770 has identified the publication. An anonymous source in a position to have direct knowledge has verified that when Ekpeki submitted the story (1) his cover letter identified Erin Cairns as the co-author, and (2) the manuscript had both authors’ named on the title page. File 770 has seen archived copies of the documents.
Furthermore, while the publication’s mission is “supporting Black, African, and African Diaspora creatives globally”, File 770 learned from the source that the magazine has published material by a white author before, and that a submission having a white co-author would not have been a barrier to publication there.
The characterization of the story as “entirely written” by Cairns is disputed by Ekpeki in his rebuttal “ODE Response to Accusations By Erin” for the following reasons.
Cairns and Ekpeki came to work together on her story “The Face of Our Demon” in 2020 as detailed in her report. File 770’s post “Author Erin Cairns Charges Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki with ‘Unethical Practices’” outlined that history:
…Ekpeki, telling her there was by now more demand for his work than he could satisfy, asked if Cairns was interested in co-authoring, which in this case would mean jointly revising a story she had already drafted: “[He] would change the story to reflect a more own-voice context, and give it more Nigerian spiritualism and culture, but distance it from the real world inspiration I’d had for the story (a Makonde mask I’d seen in the Dallas Museum of Art).”
But when [Editor S] solicited the story they had co-authored for [Market 2], a “Black voices magazine”, Cairns disagreed with Ekpeki about the ethics of allowing that to happen, and following some tense correspondence (reproduced in the report) she got Ekpeki to withdraw the story….
In Ekpeki’s rebuttal posted on October 31, he calls the story a collaboration:
I submitted a story, written entirely by her, that’s not true. It was a collaborative piece. She consented to it being collaborative, before and after. She was satisfied with my contributions and okay with me sending it out. I gave her updates, before, during and after.
Asked for specific examples of his contributions, Ekpeki told File 770: “I helped ground the story. Things like settings, location, world, cultural leaning, character names. Basically world building.” Here are screencaps of texts where he recommended changes to her. [Click for larger images.]
His rebuttal continues:
“Erin was fine with my contributions, name change, settings, grounding the story regionally. These things are valid contributions which she consented to, accepted and was happy with. That constitutes a collaboration.
“These are from Erin Cairns own screenshots on her document which show us deliberating on the story. The grounding and changes I suggested which were made. Which she was fine with. So it wasn’t solely written by her. It had contributions from me, which we agreed on. That it was solely written by her, is just not true. After we dropped the story, she reached out to ask me for permission to send out her version without my contributions.”
Whether or not the quantity of writing Ekpeki had done would satisfy everyone that it should be termed a collaboration, the screencapped correspondence between them in Cairns’ report shows they intended to treat this story as being co-authored.
THE BACKGROUND TO CAIRNS’ CHARGES. Reading the messages between Cairns and Ekpeki shows that she was frustrated by their communications, and suspicious about why she wasn’t in the loop with the submission process for the story. Cairns explained in her report:
…He sent me a screenshot of him telling the magazine that I was attached (after the story had been accepted), but they had never responded. To me, this meant it was likely he had removed my name from the byline of the manuscript.
He reiterated that [Editor S] knew who I was and had still solicited the story. But still refused to give me contact with them…
Nevertheless, her name was on the byline of the manuscript. Was he unable to document that at the time? Because Ekpeki seems to have created more doubt by trying to allay Cairns’ concerns. That was the reason why, on the day the submission was accepted, he wrote to remind the editors about the co-authorship, and Cairns’ background, then copied that message to her.
Then there still remained her second concern, whether her story should have been submitted to this market at all. After the story was submitted, other editors — not [Editor S] — were assigned to review it. Cairns became worried whether it was ethical for her, as a white South African, to have submitted a story to [Market 2]. She was aware of their mission statement about “supporting Black, African, and African Diaspora creatives globally”.
I didn’t know how to even answer all of that, so the conversation became about whether or not [Market 2] was a Black voices only magazine. I said it seemed like it was black voices only from everything I could see. He insisted it wasn’t explicitly stated.
…I tried to be non-accusatory, but after realizing that [Editor S] wasn’t involved in the story’s selection, and this was a black voices magazine, I was panicking.
Even File 770 required the input of an anonymous source to verify that a white author could potentially be published by the magazine. Whereas Cairns got no reply from the editors of [Market 2] when she contacted them about her concerns directly:
Dear [Market 2] editors, My name is Erin Cairns, your magazine is publishing a story I co-wrote with Oghenechovwe Ekpeki called “The Face of Our Demon”. I only learned about this recently, and I’m feeling a little out of the loop. Oghenechovwe has been understandably busy these past few months, and while he’s passed on some of your communications in recent days, I can’t help but feel that some lines of communication have been crossed for a while. I did not understand that [Market 2] was a primarily, if not entirely, black voice magazine. I am a white South African, and if I had known, I would first have asked through this portal if a contribution from me would have been welcome. From what I understand, the story was accepted mid-December, but you did not know I was attached until early February. This leaves me a little unsure about whether my name will make it to the byline, or even if you still want to publish this story. If not, I completely understand, and I would immediately withdraw the story with sincere apologies. If there is to be more communication about ‘The Face of Our Demon’, could you please cc me in on the emails with Oghenechovwe so that we both have the information? He’s cc’d me in on his last email, the one with the revisions, but it was in response to a [S]ubmittable reply that I cannot see or follow
(Note: As discussed above, Cairns was unaware the editors knew she was a co-author from the beginning.)
The editors did not reply to Cairns. Instead, she learned from Ekpeki that they had informed him about the message.
I asked him outright why they weren’t willing to talk to me. In response, he abandoned the pretense of the market being open to a submission from me and told me ‘It’s an African exclusive space’ and the ‘politics of white Africans is complicated’. But he’d just spent months obfuscating this issue between me and the magazine. He said he was ‘trying to make sure things went smoothly till publication’ though what me or the magazine were supposed to do in the rough waters after publication would then likely be up to me and the magazine, with me looking like I was a part of hiding my own involvement in a story I’d written in its entirety.
Cairns soon asked Ekpeki to withdraw the story from [Market 2] and he did.
Ekpeki’s Response characterizes the problems between them as miscommunication, misunderstanding, and mismatched expectations:
…Could I have communicated better? Of course. You always can. But you must remember that we are both disabled, chronically ill people. And one of them, me, lives in way worse conditions, in the poverty capital of the world, with little to no access to health care. If anything there’s a human being who is less than perfect, doing the best he can, which could yet be better. Not malfeasance or lack of ethics, or malice or an attempt at theft. There was a lot of miscommunication and misunderstandings and assumptions on both sides from two people in not great situations…
At one point he says, “I apologize for the pain that caused”, however, the statement comes in the middle of a paragraph focused on his extenuating circumstances.
OTHER ISSUES IN CAIRNS REPORT. Cairns also objected to not having received the credit she deserved for the work she did on Ekpeki’s behalf. For example:
We interacted on twitter for a while, exchanging stories for critique which I had done many times before. But this gradually shifted into me editing stories, which at the time I did not know was for his co-edited anthology: [Anthology D]. When he told me a story I’d worked on was going to be in the anthology, I questioned him about what I’d been doing. He told me that for my help and work, my name would be in the acknowledgments of the book.
When the book was released, I bought a copy, and my name was nowhere to be found….
…He hadn’t been transparent with me about his involvement with [Anthology D] when it was being put together, even while I was editing for it. And when I asked about the other stories I was critiquing or editing for him, he would give me vague answers like he wanted it to be a pleasant surprise…
Ekpeki’s response is that the only story she edited for [Anthology D] was his:
…She did not edit stories, not the plural which were for the anthology. She edited one story, mine, which appeared on it. How can I acknowledge you in a book that’s not mine, for one story I have in it? Do people give credits for one story being copy edited, in the whole book? I do not recall promising this….
People’s reaction in social media has ranged from expressions of empathy for Cairns to contending that she should have been given credit as a co-editor of the book.
We now know that Anthology D was Dominion, which on the cover says it was edited by Zelda Knight and Ekpeki, with Joshua Omenga also named as an editor in the Amazon listing. Silvia Moreno-Garcia has weighed in on Bluesky (relevant portion of the thread begins here). Her updated views are excerpted below. Knight and Ekpeki have posted counter arguments to the thread.
ADDITIONAL REACTION IN SOCIAL MEDIA. Cairns’ report prompted several people to comment publicly about issues involving Ekpeki that until now were known to a limited number, or to come forward with their own complaints.
Ekpeki has responded to several of these criticisms and allegations in a Bluesky thread that starts here.
CONCLUSION. Erin Cairns led her report with the most volatile charges – that Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki had submitted a story “entirely written” by her solely under his own byline, and with the added deception that the market was a “Black voices magazine” whereas she is a white South African (living in the U.S.) But it has now been established that both her and Ekpeki’s names were on the byline of the manuscript, that the editor who solicited the submission knew her background, and that it was not inappropriate for her co-authored story to be submitted to the magazine, which has published a white author in the past.
The result is a more accurate set of facts to discuss. That does not put all controversy to rest. Other issues in Cairns’ report still remain open and are the subject of debate. And its publication has created ripples of criticism against Ekpeki in social media from those with complaints of their own.
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I will just point out that both allegations/controversies appear, if I understand this correctly, to be due to the misunderstandings and miscommunications.
Even if Erin’s got the wrong end of things here, that level of confusion (Why on EARTH shouldn’t an editor address both parties on a co-authored piece, with market 2? What on earth about ‘supporting Black, African, and African Diaspora creatives globally’ would lead someone to assume white authors are welcome? Why couldn’t she be CC’d in on e-mails like she asked to be? Why shouldn’t Erin have been aware of the situation around Dominion while she was doing the work instead of having it come out later? ‘And when I asked about the other stories I was critiquing or editing for him, he would give me vague answers like he wanted it to be a pleasant surprise’ she said – if things are so confused, it sounds like it’d be easy for her to inaccurately assume she was doing more work on the thing than she actually did given how little information she had. Why was Erin forced to take Oghenechovwe’s word repeatedly?) make me very… wary, about this.
Just, for what it’s worth, I don’t think resolving individual factual statements resolves this situation.
Is the situation here that Erin was misinformed during her working relationship with Oghenechovwe and is making allegations based on her confusion? Then the fact she was so badly misled while working with Oghenechovwe is still an enormous red flag against anyone thinking of working with him.
It sounds like this entire chain of events could have been resolved if Oghenechovwe had been more open, clearer, and hadn’t played games.
These are not traits I want to see in an author I work with or an editor I submit stories to.
The way this post is initially framed and its conclusion seem pretty bizarre, given all the notes in the body that point out that Cairns couldn’t get Ekpeki to actually be clear with her about anything, and that other people have now come forward with stories about his behavior.
For what it’s worth, I don’t believe it’s accurate to portray this as a collaboration even if that’s what Ekpeki believes it is. My understanding is that he took a story Cairns initially wrote and offered to collaborate on it with her to make it more authentic. That’s fine, and would be a collaboration, but in the end all he did was suggest she change the character names. She agreed to that and sent him the file, assuming he would make other edits to “ground” it — he did not make a single other change, as far as I’m aware. I’m sure Cairns would be happy to provide you with a copy of the file Ekpeki initially saw, and the final version, if you’d like to compare them and draw your own conclusions. (You have her email address, Mike, and she’s said she is willing to talk to you before.)
Also, it’s undeniable that the story was printed without Cairns name in the byline: https://books.google.com/books?id=vNDoDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT5&source=kp_read_button&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&gboemv=1&ovdme=1#v=onepage&q&f=false
Especially given that Ekpeki was an editor for the anthology, I can’t see that as anything other than his taking complete credit for another writer’s work– even if he did sincerely believe it was a collaboration, that is 100% plagiarism.
I understand the need to report fully on an issue from multiple perspectives, but especially given the other publicly shared instances of manipulative behavior, lying, and even verbal abuse, I’m concerned that File 770 may be unintentionally turning this into a “he said, she said” kind of issue–a classic tactic used by manipulative people to twist reality to meet their own ends and gaslight their victims.
That’s pretty disappointing.
Stewart: When Cairns’ went public with her report (after trying to get me to publish it anonymously, with your encouragement) File 770 published a post leading with the accusations in her opening, which were the most egregious. Now that I have investigated them and found the most egregious ones aren’t true, it is my responsibility to clear up the record. Even though I know I will be attacked for doing so.
I haven’t said she has nothing to complain about. That’s why I didn’t stop writing after I corrected the facts, but continued with a roundup of other issues.
Stewart: Also, your link is to the Dominion anthology. “The Face of Our Demon” was not published there. It is very unfortunate that by not clarifying that you are pointing to another story Cairns edited that you have conflated the two separate cases.
FWIW, I don’t think she was trying to get it published anonymously here–the report clearly has her name on it and she was willing to have it shared by you. That was my miscommunication, and I apologize for that! (It was the other commentary I’d collected that had people wanting to remain anonymous. Some of those folks have now come forward, but others still haven’t.)
Erin has said in the past she is willing to show people the different versions of the manuscript file for this story so they can draw their own conclusions.
Would you be interested in taking a look at that if she is still willing to show them to you? I can set up a Zoom.
On the subject of facts:
Dominion was not a magazine, but a one-off anthology. The publisher may well have published white authors in the past, but that doesn’t necessarily disprove Erin’s claim here. She said that after she told Ekpeki about the opportunity, not knowing that he was co-editing it, the guidelines were changed from what they initially were to say “white south african need not apply.”
Unfortunately, the wayback machine only has the very first set of submission guidelines, which were published before Erin says they were changed. So there’s no way to prove or disprove that particular claim, IMO.
Thank you, Mike, for the substantial and important original research. Ongoing too, it seems.
Oooh, oops. Thank you for pointing that out! That’s my mistake, one hundred percent. Sorry!
Can you delete these two paragraphs? They are clearly wrong. My fault!
Stewart: Dominion is not the publication “The Face of Our Demon” was submitted to. The publication was a magazine, and a nonpaying market. You apparently have misunderstood Cairns’ report.
And this very post has the screencaps of Ekpeki’s changes to the story. I’ve reported how limited they were. And that’s why others object to the word collaboration. But what they had arranged between themselves was to treat it as a coauthorship. You don’t have to agree that was a good deal.
I got mixed up by the fact that I was reading it when the market was not named. Now that we’re talking about Dominion, I assumed that was the market in question. My mistake!
With respect, all the screencaps show is his changing the names. Erin did not agree that “changing the names” was to be the extent of his collaboration. She believed–and I believe the screencaps in this post show Ekpeki claiming?–that he would make further edits. He did not.
I will leave this alone now since my confusion and conflation of two different stories are muddying the waters (sorry, again, about that).
But this “refutal” doesn’t convince me that anything at all about Ekpeki’s claiming another author’s work as his own has been refuted, personally.
I’ve asked Mike to delete all my previous comments on this post, as I clearly had a major reading comprehension failure this morning.
Personally, though, nothing in this post really convinces me that anything in Erin’s report has been disproven–even if some of what she’s said turned out to not be true, I don’t think there was any way for her to know that.
Stewart: I guess that’s one difference between us. When I verify something is false, I accept that it is false, even if the person who said it didn’t know it was false.
However, it is important to add that Erin Cairns also didn’t know that her charge was true — that Ekpeki had left her name off the byline. She merely assumed that must have happened because it was a way to make sense of the way Ekpeki was responding to her, and how she was being ignored by the magazine’s editors. But it wasn’t true.
One question I have…
When an anthology is put together and stories are submitted to the anthology does each individual story normally list all of the various editors who contributed to each story? Perhaps that is normal and I’ve just missed it in my years of reading anthologies.
I realize I write scripts and not prose but when I’ve collaborated with others, it’s about plot, character, story, and dialogue. If I’m reading your update correctly, Ekpeki’s “co-writing” amounted to changing character and place names. That’s not collaborating. That’s being a research assistant. In fact, the Writers Guild of America, when arbitrating credits on screenplays, specifically states in its rules that changing names does not qualify as writing for credit purposes. (True, the WGA and its rules are in no way involved but concepts of what qualifies as writing, re-writing, and co-authoring seem much the same to me.)
Craig Miller: Yes, I think that’s all he did. I also think that arguing it wasn’t a true collaboration just looks like moving the goalposts once you can no longer support the claim that Cairns name wasn’t on the byline.
@Dan Geiser: I wouldn’t expect that every person who contributed to editing each story in an anthology would necessarily get mentioned in the acknowledgments.
On the other hand, if one of the authors requested to the anthology editor, “Hey, can you mention [Jane Doe] on the acknowledgments page for assisting with editing for my story?”, the anthology editor could certainly acknowledge Jane Doe if they chose to do so.
And, in this case, where Ekpeki agrees that Erin Cairns edited Ekpeki’s own story that was published in the Dominion anthology of which Ekpeki was one of the two editors, he certainly should have acknowledged her in the acknowledgments if he had promised to do so. I don’t know what he’s thinking of by asking, “How can I acknowledge you in a book that’s not mine?” Dominion is his book — his name is on the cover as one of the two editors along with Zelda Knight.
Well this is a tangled mess
Believe me, after going through this material for 15 or 20 hours — it’s still a mess. But I found solid answers to my own questions.
As far as I can tell, while he’s addressed the Cairns report and some other allegations on Twitter/blue sky, he has not responded to the L.D. Lewis statement that he was removed from Fiyahcon for ethics violations and I believe there was one other allegations about removal from one or two other BIPOC writers spaces for problematic behavior(?) that I did not see addressed in the social media threads linked to here. But I’m not on most social media like x,blue sky, mastodon, etc so I may have missed something.
Erin here. He disproved nothing. I did not claim to be on the editorial team for antho D. He said I’d get a thank you in antho D’s acknowledgements for my work editing his story. I didn’t. I was told there would be changes to the story I sent him for Market 2, there were none. I’m willing to cc you in to any and all versions of the story. You have my contact info. Ask me for more proof directly, and tell me what proof would qualify for your burden, I’m not playing he said/she said games.
It’s nonsense to say “He disproved nothing” when I have copies of the “[Market 2]’s” archived Submittable records showing what you claimed wasn’t true — he did include your name on the byline, he did name you as coauthor in the cover letter.
Furthermore, I was able to establish from a knowledgeable source that white authors were not barred from contributing to [Market 2]. Although I definitely understand why one would think so after reading their mission statement. But thinking so, and it actually being so, are far apart in this case.
These are all things that your report represented as true — but they weren’t.
As for how little he proposed to add to the story — I show that in the screencaps within the post. Changes to names and a few other words. You don’t need to send me copies. I already believe you.
However, ODE submitted the story to several paying markets where it was rejected, and only then to nonpaying [Market 2]. What if it had sold? Were you going to deny permission to publish? From the copious screencapped correspondence in your report, it seemed that getting the story published was the priority, and sticking his name on it was going to help with that. I really don’t have any interest in passing judgment on this arrangement. I’m just not going to climb on the plagiarism train when the sequence of events began with him asking about coauthorship followed by you sending him this story to work on. And, to all appearances, after it didn’t get sold, accepted his recommendation to send it to [Market 2] (because of “Editor S”‘s request).
Erin says several times in her report that she expected and believed Ekpeki was revising the story. She was not just hoping to “stick” his name on it.
Quote: “I still had not seen the revisions he had done to the story, but that he was willing to change a big conflict in it when speaking to Editor S I figured he had it handled.”
Erin was sick and did not hear back from him for a long period of time until he mentioned Market 2 (she was at that point under the impression that he had made revisions). Eventually Erin insisted to see the story and realized he hadn’t made changes as she’d assumed.
This is another case of bad communication: Erin thinks the story will be revised, it’s not revised, she is not in touch with editors so is no position to easily provide edits or feedback, and so on and so forth. This bad communication is rampant throughout all of the interactions. It would have all been easily cleared if Ekpeki had emailed Editor S and included her in correspondence with Erin and I can’t understand why he didn’t do it. Neither do I understand why he didn’t simply tell her he had changed his mind about including her name in his anthology as he’d promised.
All this conflict would have been easily avoided with a few emails.
I think the failure of Ekpeki and the magazine editor to communicate clearly (Ekpeki) or at all (the magazine editor) created 100% of the confusion over that story. Cairns got her false impressions from that, and responded rationally based on that.
That lack of communication is a red flag for me. YMMV, and obviously does.
For anybody who is curious, Zelda Knight has spoken more about this. According to her Bluesky thread Erin edited the story twice: in 2019 and 2020, before and after it was part of Dominion. The timeline is: Erin edits a story that is sent to Knight’s magazine, Oghenechovwe begins to co-edit anthology with Knight and asks Erin to edit his story a second time, edited story is included in anthology without acknowledging Erin’s edits, etc.
Even though Knight indicates Erin should have known that the story she edited twice was going in Dominion, there was no way for Erin to know that unless Oghenechovwe informed her about this. According to Erin that was the problem, that he did not indicate the story would be included in the anthology until later, when he offered to acknowledge her. Once again here is a situation that snowballed because of lack of clear communications.
It would be more helpful to read what Knight actually said.
Knight’s Bluesky thread begins here: https://bsky.app/profile/crownebooks.bsky.social/post/3laojk6q7nk2j
An,
Thanks for taking screenshots, I have no idea how to insert those. Looking at her timeline the crucial point seems to be August 2019. At that point Erin has edited a first version of the story, which has been accepted in a magazine edited by Knight. Unknown to Erin, Knight is putting together an anthology and selects that same story to be in the anthology (and asks Oghenechovwe to co-edit the anthology with her).
This is probably why Erin says: “When he told me a story I’d worked on was going to be in the anthology, I questioned him about what I’d been doing.” Oghenechovwe did not know he was going to be co-editing until August of 2019. At that point it would have been easy to explain that things had changed, and he both had a story in the anthology and was co-editing. Communications lines are crossed.
In February of 2020 Erin makes more edits to the story. There is some indication on Bluesky that it is in February of 2020 that Oghenechovwe offers to give some kind of credit to Erin for the edits: https://bsky.app/profile/erincairns.bsky.social/post/3lac3p52cuy2t
The pattern of miscommunication and lack of information between both people that begins with Anthology D worsens with Market 2.
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