Isabel Wilkerson Biography  

Isabel Wilkerson was born in Washington, D.C., in 1961 and attended Howard University before pursuing a career in journalism. As the Chicago bureau chief for the New York Times, Wilkerson won a Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1994. She left the New York Times in the mid-1990s to begin work on her first book project, published in 2010 as The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. In this book, Wilkerson writes about the mass movement of Black Americans from the South to the North between 1915 and 1970. Her narrative combines documentary research with in-depth looks at the lives of three such migrants, and the result won her the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction (2010) and a National Humanities Medal (2015) among other honors. The citation for the latter award praised Wilkerson for “her masterful combination of intimate human narratives with broader societal trends.” Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020), which combines archival and sociological research with personal vignettes, continues this practice of using individual stories to shed light on societal phenomena.