Isabel Wilkerson is an American journalist and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration. She was the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.
Biography
Born in Washington D.C. in 1961, Wilkerson studied journalism at Howard University, becoming editor-in-chief of the college newspaperThe Hilltop. During college, she interned at publications including the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. In 1994, while Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times, she became the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism, winning the feature writing award for her coverage of the 1993 midwestern floods and her profile of a 10-year-old boy who was responsible for his four siblings. Several of Wilkerson's articles are included in the book Pulitzer Prize Feature Stories: America's Best Writing, 1979 - 2003, edited by David Garlock. Wilkerson has won a George S. Polk Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Journalist of the Year award from the National Association of Black Journalists. She has also been the James M. Cox Professor of Journalism at Emory University, Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University and the Kreeger-Wolf endowed lecturer at Northwestern University and Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction at Boston University's College of Communication. She also served as a board member of the National Arts in Journalism Program at Columbia University. After fifteen years of research and writing, she published The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration in 2010, which examines the three geographic routes that were commonly used by African Americans leaving the southern states between 1915 and the 1970s, illustrated through the personal stories of people who took those routes. During her research for the book, Wilkerson interviewed more than 1,000 people who made the migration from the South to Northern and Western cities. The book almost instantly hit number 5 on the New York Times Bestseller list for nonfiction and has since been included in lists of best books of 2010 by many reviewers, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Amazon.com, Salon.com, The Washington Post, The Economist, Atlanta Magazine and The Daily Beast. In March 2011 the book won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The book also won the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction, the Mark Lynton History Prize, the Sidney Hillman Book Prize, the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction and was also the nonfiction runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in 2011. In a 2010 New York Times interview, Wilkerson described being part of a movement of African Americans who have chosen to return to the South after generations in the North. A 2020 review of her book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents in the New York Times described it as "an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far."
Books
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Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.
Essays, columns and lectures
The New American Reader: Recent Periodical Essays, edited by Gilbert H. Muller
"He Put a Spin on Design", in The Last Word: The New York Times Book of Obituaries and Farewells : a Celebration of Unusual Lives, edited by Marvin Siegel
"Superstars of Dreamland", in Best American Movie Writing, edited by George Plimpton
We Americans: Celebrating a Nation, Its People and Its Past, edited by Thomas B. Allen and Charles O. Hyman
"Two Boys, a Debt, a Gun, a Victim: The Face of Violence", in Writing the World: Reading and Writing about Issues of the Day, edited by Charles R. Cooper, Susan Peck MacDonald.
Written into History: Pulitzer Prize Reporting of the Twentieth Century, edited by Anthony Lewis
"First Born, Fast Grown: The Manful Life of Nicholas, 10", in Feature Writing for Newspapers and Magazines: The Pursuit of Excellence, edited by Edward Jay Friedlander and John Lee ; and The Princeton Anthology of Writing, edited by John McPhee and Carol Rigolot
Various articles, Pulitzer Prize Feature Stories: America's Best Writing, 1979 - 2003, edited by David Garlock
"Angela Whitiker's Climb", in Class Matters, by correspondents of The New York Times
"Interviewing: Accelerated Intimacy", in Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call
"America’s Enduring Caste System"
Awards
1993 George S. Polk Award for Regional Reporting, in The New York Times
