Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson (born 1961) is an American journalist and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010) and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020). She is the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.^[1]

Isabel Wilkerson
Wilkerson at the 2010 Texas Book Festival
Born	1961 (age 63–64) Washington, D.C., U.S.
Occupation	Journalist, author
Education	Howard University (BA)
Genre	Journalism, History
Notable works	The Warmth of Other Suns Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Notable awards	George S. Polk Award Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists National Book Critics Circle Award (Nonfiction) Anisfield-Wolf Book Award

Wilkerson was the editor-in-chief of the Howard University college newspaper, interned at the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post, and became the Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times. She also taught at Emory University, Princeton University, Northwestern University, and Boston University.

Wilkerson interviewed more than a thousand people for The Warmth of Other Suns (2010), which documents the stories of African Americans who migrated to northern and western cities during the 20th century. Her 2020 book Caste describes the racial hierarchy in the United States as a caste system. Both books were best-sellers.

Early life and education

Isabel Wilkerson was born in Washington, D.C. in 1961 to parents who left Virginia during the Great Migration. Her father, Alexander Wilkerson, was one of the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II.^[2]

Wilkerson studied journalism at Howard University, becoming editor-in-chief of the college newspaper The Hilltop. During college, she interned at publications including the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.^[3]

Career

In 1994, while the Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times, she became the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism,^[1] 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.^[4] Several of Wilkerson's articles are included in the book Pulitzer Prize Feature Stories: America's Best Writing, 1979 – 2003, edited by David Garlock.

She has 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.^[3][5]

External videos
Q&A interview with Isabel Wilkerson on The Warmth of Other Suns, September 26, 2010, C-SPAN

After fifteen years of research and writing, she published in 2010 The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration,^[6] 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.^[7] 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.^{[8][9][10][11][12][13]} In March 2011, The Warmth of Other Suns won the National Book Critics Circle Award (Nonfiction). The book won the Anisfield-Wolf Award^[14] for Nonfiction, the Mark Lynton History Prize, the Sidney Hillman Book Prize, the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction and was the nonfiction runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in 2011.

In a 2010 New York Times interview, Wilkerson described herself as being part of a movement of African Americans who have chosen to return to the South after generations in the North.^[15]

In 2016, Wilkerson was awarded a National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama for "championing an unsung history."^[16]

Wilkerson's 2020 book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents argues that racial stratification in the United States is best understood as a caste system, akin to those in India and in Nazi Germany.^[17] A review by Dwight Garner 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."^[17] Publishers Weekly called Caste a "powerful and extraordinarily timely social history."^[18] Caste was included in Oprah's Book Club, where Oprah Winfrey discussed calling the author after the book's release, saying "I was crying because I was so moved by this book." ^[19]The reviewer for The Chicago Tribune wrote that the book was "among the year's best" books.^[20] The book peaked at number one on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list.^[21] On October 14, 2020, Netflix announced Ava DuVernay would write, direct, and produce a feature film adaptation of Caste.^[22]

Personal life

Wilkerson has been married twice. She married Roderick Jeffrey Watts in Fort Washington, Maryland, in 1989.^[23] Wilkerson married her second husband, Brett Kelly Hamilton, in 2009. Hamilton died in 2015 after being ill for some time.^[24] Hamilton suffered from a rare type of brain tumor. After multiple surgeries he suffered from seizures. It is believed that a seizure is what took his life on July 19, 2015. ^[25]

Bibliography

Books

• The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (Random House, 2010). ISBN 978-0-679-44432-9
• Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (Random House, 2020). ISBN 978-0-593-23025-1

Essays, columns and lectures

• The New American Reader: Recent Periodical Essays, edited by Gilbert H. Muller (McGraw-Hill, 1997)
• "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 (William Morrow, 1997)
• "Superstars of Dreamland", in Best American Movie Writing, edited by George Plimpton (St. Martin's Press, 1998)
• We Americans: Celebrating a Nation, Its People and Its Past, edited by Thomas B. Allen and Charles O. Hyman (National Geographic Society, 1999)
• "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 (Macmillan, 2000). ISBN 0-312-26008-3
• Written into History: Pulitzer Prize Reporting of the Twentieth Century, edited by Anthony Lewis (Times Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2001)
• "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 (HarperCollins College Publishers, 1997); and The Princeton Anthology of Writing, edited by John McPhee and Carol Rigolot (Princeton University Press, 2001)
• Various articles, Pulitzer Prize Feature Stories: America's Best Writing, 1979 – 2003, edited by David Garlock (Iowa State University Press, 1998; Wiley-Blackwell; 2nd edition, April 18, 2003)
• "Interviewing Sources", Spring 2002 Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference Report
• "Angela Whitiker's Climb", in Class Matters, by correspondents of The New York Times (Times Books, 2005)
• "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 (Plume Penguin Books, January 30, 2007)
• "America's Enduring Caste System" (cover story of The New York Times Magazine, July 1, 2020)^[26]

Awards

• 1993: George S. Polk Award for Regional Reporting, in The New York Times
• 1994: Pulitzer Prize in Journalism for Feature Writing^[27]
• 1994: Journalist of the Year award from the National Association of Black Journalists
• 1998: Guggenheim Fellowship^[28]
• 2010: National Book Critics Circle Award (Nonfiction), winner, The Warmth of Other Suns
• 2011: NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Debut Author, nominated, The Warmth of Other Suns
• 2011: Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, winner, The Warmth of Other Suns
• 2015: National Humanities Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities^[29]
• 2020: Los Angeles Times Book Prize Current Interest winner, Caste^[30]

Wilkerson has been awarded honorary doctorates from several universities:

• 1998: Hamline University^[31]
• 2011: DePaul University^[32]
• 2011: Niagara University^[33]
• 2012: Howard University^[34]
• 2013: Muhlenberg College^[35]
• 2014: Southern Methodist University^[36]
• 2014: Bates College^[37]
• 2018: Middlebury College^[38]
• 2022: Smith College^[39]
• 2022: Colby College^[40]
• 2022: Northwestern University^[41]
• 2023: Occidental College^[42]

Legacy

In 2023, Ava DuVernay filmed Origin, a biographical drama about Wilkerson and the writing of her book Caste. Aunjanue Ellis played the leading role, who described Isabel as a "journalistic, literary Indiana Jones".^[43] The film is based on Isabel Wilkerson's personal experience with loss and an investigation of racial history in the United States.^[44]

Wilkerson's book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents was included in book ban efforts in Texas libraries in 2023. In an interview with Oprah Daily, Wilkerson states that the book ban "brings more attention to the necessity of reading and knowing our history,"^[45]