Public Biography
Amara Okafor-Williams is a business and economics correspondent for The New York Time5, covering markets, labor, corporate governance, and the broader economy. She joined the paper in 2019 after six years at Bloomberg News, where she covered commodities and emerging markets.
Ms. Okafor-Williams graduated summa cum laude from Howard University with a degree in economics and holds an M.B.A. from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Before journalism, she spent two years as an analyst at Goldman Sachs, an experience she has described as “professionally formative and spiritually clarifying, in the sense that I became very clear about wanting to leave.”
She was born in Silver Spring, Maryland, to a Nigerian-born father who teaches electrical engineering at the University of Maryland and an American-born mother who practices immigration law. She speaks English, Igbo, and what she calls “enough French to read a central bank communiqué, which is all anyone should need.”
Ms. Okafor-Williams was a finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award in 2023 for a series on municipal bond markets that her editor acknowledged “nobody else would have written, or possibly read.” She lives in Brooklyn.
Selected Coverage
- A six-part investigation into the secondary market for discontinued breakfast cereals
- The economic multiplier effects of the annual Elk Grove Community Chess Tournament on local hospitality revenue
- “The Yield Curve Does Not Care About Your Feelings,” an analysis that became the paper’s most-forwarded business story of 2025