Isabel Wilkerson
1 book analyzed
Biography
Isabel Wilkerson (born 1961) was the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism, awarded in 1994 for her work as Chicago Bureau Chief of the New York Times. Her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns (2010), a narrative history of the Great Migration, was a critical and commercial triumph, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award and establishing Wilkerson as one of America's foremost narrative nonfiction writers. Caste (2020) was born from a decade of thinking about why the patterns she documented in The Warmth of Other Suns persisted — why the Great Migration changed geography but not hierarchy. The book was selected for Oprah's Book Club, became a number-one New York Times bestseller, and was adapted into the 2023 film Origin, directed by Ava DuVernay.