Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson is an acclaimed author and journalist whose work focuses on the experience of African Americans living in the United States. She is best known for her book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

Born in Washington D.C. in 1961, Wilkerson was one of the first black women to join the staff of The New York Times. As an editor, she wrote and edited articles about race, class and social issues. In her columns, she specialized in writing stories that presented the African American community in all its complexity and diversity.

After leaving the newspaper in 1996, Wilkerson turned to writing books. Her debut book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, was published in 2010. It tells the story of the more than six million African Americans who left the segregated South between 1910 and 1970. These people, known as the Great Migrants, found success—and even created their own cities—in their newly adopted homes in the North, West and Midwest. Wilkerson interviewed African American elders about their experiences for the book, and also conducted extensive research in archives and libraries.

The Warmth of Other Suns proved to be a commercial and critical success. In addition to the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award, the book also won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Take Home Tulip Prize, the Ohioana Book Award, and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. The book was named one of the New York Times’ Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2010, and it was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Wilkerson’s other books are Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which was published in 2020, and Men Lead and Women Rule, which was published in 2002 and is a study of the gender roles in African American culture.

In addition to writing books, Wilkerson also lectures on race and other social topics. She has been a visiting professor at a number of universities, and she received the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 1999, the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award in 2002, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers in 2003. Wilkerson has also served as director of narrative nonfiction for Allwyn Corporation and Curator of Storytelling for the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Isabel Wilkerson is one of the leading American authors and journalists researching the experience of African Americans in the United States. Her work is acclaimed for its depth of research and its ability to tell stories about the complexity and diversity of the black experience. With her books and lectures, she is a powerful and important voice on American race relations.