Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, is the author the critically acclaimed New York Times bestsellers The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.
Her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, tells the story of the Great Migration, a watershed in American history. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction, the Lynton History Prize from Harvard and Columbia universities, the Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize and was shortlisted for both the Pen-Galbraith Literary Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
WARMTH was named to more than 30 Best of the Year lists, including The New York Times’ 10 Best Books of the Year, Amazon’s 5 Best Books of the Year and Best of the Year lists in The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and The Economist, among others. It made national news when President Obama chose the book for summer reading in 2011. In 2012, The New York Times Magazine named Warmth to its list of the best nonfiction books of all time.
Her second book, CASTE: The Origins of Our Discontents, explores the unrecognized hierarchy in the America, its history and its consequences. Caste became an instant New York Times bestseller, was named the summer/fall selection for Oprah’s legendary Book Club and was longlisted for the National Book Award.
Wilkerson won the Pulitzer Prize for her work as Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times in 1994, making her the first black woman in the history of American journalism to win a Pulitzer and the first African-American to win for individual reporting. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal for “championing the stories of an unsung history.”
She has appeared on national programs such as “Fresh Air with Terry Gross,” CBS’s “60 Minutes,” NBC’s “Nightly News,” “The PBS News Hour,” MSNBC’s “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell,” “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah,” NPR’s “On Being with Krista Tippett,” the BBC and others. She has taught at Princeton, Emory and Boston universities and has lectured at more than 200 other colleges and universities across the U.S. and in Europe and Asia.
